OKAPI 



375 



No living example of this handsome giraffe has hitherto been 

 brought to this country, nor, so far as I am aware, to the Continent ; 

 neither is there a complete mounted skin in any of our museums. The 

 British Museum has, however, a mounted head and neck ; and excellent 

 photographs of dead individuals, as well as of living ones in covert, 

 were obtained during Lord Delamere's expedition to East Africa, some 

 of which are here reproduced. 



THE OKAPI 



( Ocapia johjistoni) 



Okapi OR 0-a-pi, SeMLIKI PiGMIES ; Kengi, ALBERT EDWARD 

 DISTRICT ; Makapi, Nepo 



The commencement of the twentieth century will always be 

 memorable in natural history annals as the date of the discovery of 

 the existence in the Semliki forest of East Central Africa of a second 

 generic representative of the Giraffidce, in the shape of that wonderful 

 animal the okapi. It is true, indeed, that the German traveller Junker 

 (as is stated on page 299 of the third volume of the original German 

 edition of his Travels) saw in the Nepo district a portion of striped 

 skin which was almost certainly that of the okapi ; while some years 

 later Colonel Marchand saw on the Welle what is believed to be a 

 living specimen of the same animal. But as neither of these travellers 

 recognised what they saw as new, they cannot claim to have introduced 

 the okapi to the notice of naturalists. This honour undoubtedly 

 belongs to Sir H. H. Johnston, who in 1900 sent to Dr. P. L. Sclater 

 two strips of skin from the Semliki forest, which were exhibited 

 before the Zoological Society on December 1 8 of that year (see Proc. 

 Zool. Soc. 1900, p. 950). In this year Dr. Sclater {op. cit. 1901, 

 p. 50) gave a fuller account of these strips, and proposed the name 

 Equus johnstotii for the animal to which they belonged, on the 

 supposition that they indicated a previously unknown species of zebra. 

 At the same time extracts were published from a letter of Sir Harry 

 Johnston's, in which it was stated that the Semliki Pigmies were well 

 acquainted with the supposed zebra under the name of the okapi. It 

 was, moreover, known to the officials of the Congo Free State, who 

 communicated particulars to Sir Harry sufficient to render it certain 

 that the problematical animal could not be a zebra. Later on in the 

 same year an entire skin of the okapi (now mounted in the British 



