Then One Day I Was Talking On Natural History Subjects To My Publisher, And He Told Me That His Son,

Just returned from Oxford, had developed a keen interest in osteology and was making a collection of mammalian skulls from

The whale and elephant and hippopotamus to the harvest- mouse and lesser shrew. This reminded me of the long-forgotten skull, and I told him I had something to send him for his boy's collection, but before sending it I would find out what it was. Accordingly I sent the skull to Mr. Frank E. Beddard, the prosector of the Zoological Society, asking him to tell me what it was. His reply was that it was the skull of an adult gorilla - a fine large specimen.

It was then sent on to the young collector of skulls - who will, alas! collect no more, having now given his life to his country. It saddened me a little to part with it, certainly not because it was a pretty object to possess, but only because that bleached dome beneath which brains were once housed, and those huge black cavities which were once the windows of a strange soul, and that mouth that once had a fleshy tongue that youled and clicked in an unknown language could not tell me its own life-and-death history from the time of its birth in the African forest to its final translation to a wall over a stable door in an old house near London.

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