Animals: End of N’Gi

Last week died N’Gi, famed gorilla of the Washington zoo. Ill two weeks with a chest cold, he was kept alive in an oxygen tent until one lung gave out and he succumbed to “general collapse, weakness and total loss of appetite.” N’Gi was five years old, had no known living relatives. He lived longer than any other gorilla had ever lived in captivity in the U. S. His body was taken to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore; his brain will be kept in the Smithsonian Institution, beneficiary of a $3,000 insurance policy on N’Gi’s life. Sadly said Zoo Director William M. Mann to the zoo’s head keeper: “Well, Blackburn, if we ever get another gorilla, give it a number instead of a name and don’t let yourself love it.”

During N’Gi’s illness the U. S. Press became ape-conscious. In Washington another gorilla, named O’Kero, fell ill of a cold, recovered, as did two chimpanzees, Teddy and Jo-Jo. These episodes were reported far & wide, but nowhere did a U. S. writer wax so eloquent as did Colyumist “Doc” Adams of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin upon the death last month of a goitrous orang-outang named Jennie. Colyumist Adams wrote the following elegy:

You were just a female creature

And your boudoir was a cage Still, you never lied arid simpered

When one sought to know your age You were far beneath us humans

(I’ve my own ideas on that) Yet you didn’t let Eugenie

Dead for years, pick out your hat. . . .

You were perfectly contented

To be plain Orang-Outang And if others didn’t like it

You just didn’t give a hang; And you didn’t have the feeling

(Females get it now and then) That your job on earth was solely

Making monkeys out of men.

So, in some serene Valhalla,

May you stand in deep amaze At the antics of a creature

In a cage at which you gaze Then perhaps you’ll try and puzzle

Out the dizzy state of mind Of the creature there before you

Labelled, “Modern Womankind.”