Actually, Francis Gavin can be understood to be making some sense. On etymological grounds, it appears that when Hanno said "gorillas," he was referring to human beings. But whether Pound knew this, of course, can't be determined from the text of Canto 40. The later Pound certainly had no trouble thinking of people as subhuman -- witness the disgusting prurience of his speculations about the effect of circumcision on the Jews. But that was the later Pound. On the other hand, even the early Pound seems to have taken lessons in zoological abuse from somebody like Andrei Vishinsky. Has anyone managed to count how many people are referred to in the early letters as skunks? And in case anyone is still reading: from a few sentences in the letters it appears that during the 1930s and/or 1940s Pound corresponded with Lothrop Stoddard, a racist journalist who was influential in securing the passage of the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924.* So far as I'm aware, though, none of the Pound-Stoddard correspondence has been located. Am I right about that? And does anyone know whether Pound read Stoddard's _Into the Darkness: Nazi Germany Today_ (Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1940)? Jonathan Morse * He's the "Goddard" of _The Great Gatsby_ -- the deep thinker whose book _The Rise of the Colored Empires_ gets Tom Buchanan excited about being a Nordic. In the runup to the Immigration Restriction Act, Stoddard churned out book after near-identical racist book, but the title closest to Fitzgerald's allusion is _The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy_ (Scribners, 1920).