174 BULLETIN m, UNITED STATES NATION.VL MUSEUM. 



Nzoia River skin listed under the latter form. The Meru specimen, 

 which has been referred by Roosevelt and Heller to the Ruwenzori 

 form/ is peculiar in color. It is a fine, large leopard, with large spots 

 and of a dark general coloration. The skin has been mounted, which 

 makes satisfactory comparison with tanned skins difficult; but the 

 skull differs in no essential detail from the general type found in 

 suahelica. It seems best, until more plentiful material from the 

 region is at hand, to consider this animal a slightly peculiar individual 

 of suahelica, rather than to admit the existence of a subspecies based 

 on such a limited number of specimens with a disconnected distribu- 

 tion in the forested parts of Ruwenzori and Kenia. The Meru 

 specimen, an old male, was captured in a trap. He was a "man- 

 eater," and had only a short time before killed and eaten a native 

 woman. His teeth were in bad condition, the upper carnassial 

 virtually useless. 



Young of several ages are represented in the series.- The very 

 young are quite reddish in color above, but this condition rapidly 

 changes to the common buff ground color with brownish and blackish 

 markings of the nearly grown though immature animal. The follow- 

 ing v/eights of adult male leopards are recorded in the collector's field 

 books: Ulu vStation, 112 pounds; Lake Naivasha, 126 pounds; Meru, 

 100 pounds. The female from Juja Farm weighed mider 70 pounds 

 (54 pounds dressed). 



The name sualielica, as here applied to the common East African 

 leopard, barely escapes classification as a nomen nudum. Neither 

 type-specimen nor definite type-locality were designated by Neumann, 

 in describing, or rather naming, the race. "Reference to his [Neu- 

 mann's] specimens now in the Berlin Museum shows none marked as 

 the type, so that an exact idea of what he had in mind can not now 

 be ascertained. Neumann labored under the supposition that two 

 species occurred throughout East Africa, a large-spotted and a small- 

 spotted form, the former of v/hich he attempted to describe as sua- 

 lielica. No substantial difference in the size of the spots in adults 

 from the region can be detected. There is, however, a marked differ- 

 ence in spotting in the immature and the adults, the former being 

 fine spotted, owing to the rosettes being broken up into several solid 

 spots, which later coalesce to form the rosettes of the adult. Neu- 

 mann's skins v/ere cliiefly flat specimens obtained from natives and 

 were without skulls, so that their relative ages were unknown, and 

 the error of associating the difference in size of spots with racial rather 

 than age characters was doubtless made. Old males often show the 

 larger and more completely ocellated spots" (Roosevelt and Heller, 

 Life-Histories African Game Animals, vol. 1, page 237). 



• Life-Hist. African Game Animals, vol. 1, p. 239. 1914. 



