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Show 982 MR. R. L Y D E K K E R O N T H E S K I N [Nov. 28, especially from the long shaggy hair on the nape of the neck and the absence of a mane, the specimen may be confidently assigned to the genus Cobus. Additional evidence in favour of this reference is afforded by the circumstance that the long hair on the middle line of the back is reversed from a point some distance in advance of the loins to the withers, exactly as in the Puku (G. vardoni). In size the animal to which the skin pertained must evidently have been considerably larger than the species last mentioned, and may have been more nearly comparable in this respect with G. maria of the Bahr-el-Ghazal. In colour, the nape, the sides of the buttocks, and thighs are bright chestnut-tawny ; the middle line of the back, the hinder portion of the shoulders, and the hind-quarters are the same chestnut-tawny mingled with blackish brown ; the fore part of the shoulder, a line on the under surface of the neck, the flanks, and the front surface of the fore-limbs and of the lower part of the hind limbs are of a deep glossy blackish brown, the under-parts being dirty white. The portion of the skin of the neck remaining, which seems to have been cut off a considerable distance below the head, is suggestive of a comparatively long-necked animal. And if this be a correct inference, it would be natural to expect that the horns were of a comparatively long and slender type. Now, in its dark colour the skin is more like that of Cobus maria, of the swamps of the White Nile, which is a species with comparatively long, slender, and doubly curved horns ; and it is to that animal, rather than to any other member of the genus Cobus, so far as the materials permit of forming an opinion, that I am inclined to consider the form represented by the skin before us most nearly related. Altogether apart from the distance between the White Nile and Lake Mweru, the skin under consideration is broadly distinguished from the male of Cobus maria by the absence of the white patch on the withers and the white line down the back of the neck. As regards the female of the latter species, there is a definite statement in the ' Book of Antelopes,' vol. ii. p. 122, that it is similar in all respects to the buck, except for the lack of horns; but in the plate a female is figured without the white saddle and neck-line *. As there is no other Antelope of which the skin is known that presents any close resemblance to the specimen under consideration, and since it is certainly distinct from the male of C. maria (being itself probably a male specimen), I take leave to regard it as representing a new species, for which I propose the name of Cobus smithemani; the skin represented in the figure (Plate LXXI.) being of course the type. The species may be provisionally defined as a large-sized Kob, differing from every other species of the genus except C. maria, and distinguished from the male of the latter by the absence of the white line down the back of the neck and the patch of the same colour on the withers, in which region the present species is chestnut. 1 From a specimen that has recently come under m y notice, the white neckline does not seem to be constant even in the bucks of C. maria. |