OCR Text |
Show 1873.] SIR V. BROOKE ON AFRICAN BUFFALOES. 477 cordingly, thinking the matter to be of considerable interest, I commenced a paper in which I intended to lay before the Society the facts as they then appeared to me. Fortunately, however, before sending in m y communication, I determined to take advantage of any new light which might possibly be thrown upon the subject during a visit to some of the principal continental museums. The observations consequent upon this visit may be conveniently grouped under two heads. First. As to the identity of the Bos pumilus of Turton with the Bubalus brachyceros of Gray. Second. Upon the possible identity of the smaller species of Buffalo of Eastern Africa mentioned by Heuglin and others with Bubalus pumilus. First, as regards the identity of Bos pumilus of Turton with the Bubalus brachyceros of Gray. In the magnificent Museum at Leiden are preserved the perfect skulls and horns of two Buffaloes, originally brought from the coast of Guinea by Pel. These specimens are beautifully figured in the ' Bijdragen tot de Dierkunde' (i. p. 33), and in the article accompanying the plates, as also in the Leiden Museum, are referred to the Bubalus brachyceros of Gray. It was therefore with very considerable astonishment that I found the Dutch specimens, in their much larger, more flattened, and more corrugated horns, to differ in a striking manner from the types of Dr. Gray's Bubalus brachyceros; whilst, on the other hand, in these characters they presented a strong resemblance to the old specimen, the history of which I have above given, and to the specimen in m y own collection. At first this discovery puzzled me exceedingly; but subsequent investigation has led me to what I believe to be true solution of the difficulty, viz. that notwithstanding the, at first sight, remarkable contrast between Pel's specimens and those upon which Dr. Gray founded the species Bubalus brachyceros, they in reality belong but to one species, the former representing the male, the latter the female. The name Bubalus brachyceros was first published by Dr. Gray in the ' Magazine of Natural History' for 1837 (p. 587), in a notice of two buffalo-heads obtained by Captain Clapperton in Central Africa (figure 3), and presented to the British Museum. In 1839 (Ann. Mag. Nat. Hist. p. 284) Dr. Gray amplified his former notice of the species by some observations founded on a living female Buffalo which Mr. Cross of the Surrey Zoological Gardens had just received from Sierra Leone. In this paper Dr. Gray dwells upon the close points of resemblance between the Sierra Leone specimen and those brought from Central Africa by Captain Clapperton : it may therefore be well to remark in passing that the country from which Pel's specimens were obtained lies intermediate to the countries which afforded the specimens upon which Dr. Gray's remarks were founded. Taken in connexion with this remark I find in the British Museum three specimens which, so far as m y judgment serves me, appear to decide the matter. These specimens were obtained by Dr. Baikie during the Niger expedi- |