THE BARBARY APE. 



I 



"Africa semper a liquid novi offert." Truly, 

 even to-day, the words of Pliny hold good : 

 Africa's rich store of animal life has not only 

 afforded many surprising novelties in the past but 

 even yet is apparently unexhausted. 1 It is quite 

 possible that many forms of the highest interest 

 still await discovery. The list of remarkable 

 mammals inhabiting Africa is so long that but 

 few can be mentioned here : we may, however, 

 instance as examples the gorilla, the potamogale, 

 the Burchell zebra, the sable antelope, the pigmy 

 hippopotamus, the fringe-eared oryx, and the Somali 

 giraffe. Every one of the foregoing animals has 

 only become known to Europeans within the last 

 hundred years ; the Romans were, however, 

 familiar with a considerable number of African 

 mammalia, such as the lion, leopard, elephant, and 

 common hippopotamus, whilst the addax (strepsi- 

 ceros of Pliny), the leucoryx, and the black 

 rhinoceros were also known to some of the older 

 writers. One animal, familiar to both ancients 

 and moderns, has persisted throughout a great 

 portion of its original habitat during all the long 



1 Witness the discovery of Grevy's zebra in 1882, of Hunter's 

 hartebeest in 1888, and of the okapi in 1900. 



