Cape Buffalo 97 



the Abyssinian buftalo a race of the Cape species, hut keeps the western 

 forms apart as a second species. Any one who compares a skull of the 

 Abyssinian buffalo with the West African specimen described by Dr. Gray 

 as B. centralis will scarcely fail to be convinced of the impossibility of 

 maintaining; such a distinction. 



Distribution.- — -Africa south of the Sahara. 



a. Cape, or Black Race — Bos caffer typicus 



Characters. — Size large and build very heavy and clumsy, the height 

 at the shoulder reaching to from 4 feet 10 inches to 5 feet ; skull massive, 

 with the profile immediately below the horns deeply concave. Hair, 

 except on the margins of the ears and at the tip of the tail, where it is 

 long, comparatively scanty in the adult, but thicker in the young ; general 

 colour black, frequently with a reddish tinge, most marked on the legs 

 and in young animals. Horns large and massive, exceeding twice the 

 long diameter of the skull in length ; at first directed mainly outwards, 

 but also dipping boldly downwards and backwards so as to be depressed 

 much behind the plane of the eyes, then curving upwards, forwards, and 

 inwards, but their tips widely separated, and not coming within the lines 

 of the lateral borders of the skull ; their basal anterior surfaces in old bulls 

 raised into huge convex bosses, nearly meeting in the middle line of the 

 forehead ; in cows these basal bosses much less developed, and separated 

 by a broad, hairy space. Although the profile of the head immediately 

 below the horns is markedly concave, that of the lower part of the face is 

 as distinctly convex. 



The following are the dimensions of the twelve largest pairs of horns 

 recorded by Mr. Rowland Ward in the 1896 edition of his Records of Big 

 Game : — 



