“Am I?” cried Peterkin savagely—“jesting, eh? That means expressing thoughts and opinions which are not to be understood literally. Oh, I would that I were sure that I am jesting! Ralph, it’s my belief, I tell you, that the gorilla is a regular sell—a great, big, unnatural hairy do!”
“But I saw the skeleton of one in London.”
“I don’t care for that. You may have been deceived, humbugged. Perhaps it was a compound of the bones of a buffalo and a chimpanzee.”
“Nay, that were impossible,” said I quickly; “for no one pretending to have any knowledge of natural history and comparative anatomy could be so grossly deceived.”
“What like was the skeleton, Ralph?” inquired Jack, who seemed to be rather amused by our conversation.
“It was nearly as tall as that of a medium-sized man—I should think about five feet seven or eight inches; but the amazing part about it was the immense size and thickness of its bones. Its shoulders were much broader than yours, Jack, and your chest is a mere child’s compared with that of the specimen of the gorilla that I saw. Its legs were very short—much shorter than those of a man; but its arms were tremendous—they were more than a foot longer than yours. In fact, if the brute’s legs were in the same proportion to its body as are those of a man, it would be a giant of ten or eleven feet high. Or, to take another view of it, if you were to take a robust and properly proportioned giant of that height, and cut down his legs until he stood about the height of an ordinary man, that would be a gorilla.”
“I don’t believe it,” cried Peterkin.
“Well, perhaps my simile is not quite so felicitous as—”
“I don’t mean that,” interrupted Peterkin; “I mean that I don’t believe there’s such a brute as a gorilla at all.”
“Why, what has made you so sceptical?” inquired Jack.