ROYAL ANTELOPE 183 



" Differs from R. horstocki in its much darker colour. The white 

 patches on the throat and round the eyes much smaller, and the white 

 on the belly less extended. The whole of the rest of the body dark 

 vinaceous rufous instead of oranee rufous." 



THE ROYAL ANTELOPE 



{Neotragiis pygincBus) 



Sang, LlBERlAN 



(Plate vi, fig. 13) 



With this species, the typical representative of the subfamily 

 Neotragince and the smallest of all true ruminants, we come to a group 

 which may be collectively designated pigmy antelopes. As there is 

 some difference of opinion with regard to the best mode of classifying 

 the group, I may quote a note I communicated on this subject to the 

 Field newspaper in 1 906. 



In that year " Colonel J. J. Harrison brought back from the Semliki 

 Forest the skull and skin of a pigmy antelope, which, on examination, 

 proved to be near akin to one from the Cameroons described a few years 

 previously by Mr. W. E. de Winton as Neotragus batest, although in the 

 opinion of Mr. O. Thomas, as expressed in the Annals and Magazine 

 of Natural History for August 1906, it is entitled to rank as a 

 distinct genus. In describing the Cameroon pigmy antelope Mr. de 

 Winton pointed out that it was in some respects intermediate between 

 the royal antelope {Neotragus pygniceus) of Guinea and Fanti on the 

 one hand, and the suni antelopes (commonly known as Neotragus 

 inoschatus and N. livingstonianus) on the other. Although Mr. Thomas 

 accepted this view, he proposed to refer the Cameroon and the Semliki 

 antelopes to a new genus — Hylarnus — assigning the name H. Jiarrisoni 

 to the last-named. A simpler course is, however, to revert in some 

 degree to the view of Sir Victor Brooke, as expressed in his well-known 

 paper on the royal antelope in the Zoological Society's Proceedings, and 

 to include both the pigmy antelopes and the sunis in the original genus 

 Neotragus of Hamilton Smith. We shall then have the following 

 five species, viz. : N. pygnicBus, of Guinea and Fanti ; N. batesi, 

 of the Cameroons ; N. Jiarrisoni, of the Semliki Forest ; N. living- 

 stoniajius, of Mozambique ; and A^. inoschatus, of the small islands near 

 Zanzibar. Such an arrangement accords exactly with geographical 



