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.

There are now several writers on animals who are not exactly
naturalists, nor yet mere fictionists, but who, to a considerable
knowledge of animal psychology and extraordinary sympathy with all
wildness, unite an imaginative insight which reveals to them much of
the inner, the mind life of brutes. No doubt the greatest of these is
Charles Roberts, the Canadian, and I only wish it had been he who had
discovered the old gorilla skull above the stable door, and that the
incident had fired the creative brain which gave us _Red Fox_ and
many another wonderful biography.