Click "free sample" to read the whole book no need to purchase. This was one of the first books that the prolific author Ballantyne wrote. After he had come back from his early work in Canada with the Hudson Bay Company, and written his three books in that setting, he wrote an adventure story, "The Coral Island", about three boys who find themselves cast away on a coral island in the Pacific. That book was extremely popular, and was certainly in print for over a hundred years. This book has the same three boys, now grown into young men, as the principal characters. One day the idea comes to one of them, that it would be interesting to go to Africa, hire a guide, equip themselves with a goodly supply of shot and gunpowder, and then go and kill as many gorillas as they can. Rather pointless, you might think. But the tenuous scientific reason they had was that one of the three would keep a note-book in which he would put down as much as he could about the sizes of the gorillas, and other observations about them. To see the point of this you will need to know that gorillas had only very recently been discovered when the book was written.