of little value; for one man's measurements are not often reliable guides for another man to work by. In making a group as it really should be done, we cannot rely on one man out in the field to shoot and another back at the museum to mount. The men who study the animal and who shoot him must come back and mount him, and the men who make the accessories and who paint the background must go and make their studies on the spot. When all this is done the cost of the skins, instead of being half the expense of a group, is not five per cent.
I shall make the gorilla group, on which I am now at work, a real example of the proper method. A gorilla group undertaken three years ago in the average museum would have been done in the following manner. Skins would have been purchased from hunters in Africa. The men who were going to mount them would have studied the available writings on gorillas. They would have found out that the gorilla was a ferocious animal who inhabited the dense forests and, like as not, that he lived in trees most of the time. And that is the kind of animal the group would have shown.
Not satisfied with such a method, I went to Africa to get acquainted with the gorilla in his home. I found him in a country of marvellous beauty, spending much of his time in the open forests or in the sunshine of the hillsides. I found, too, that he was neither ferocious nor in the habit of living in trees. He can climb a tree just as a man can climb a tree, but a group of human beings up a tree would be
