Liberia <*' 



richly endowed with a large mammalian fauna ; but regions of 

 it lying away from great and small rivers are rather sparsely 

 endowed with vegetation. For although the rainfall in this 

 steppe country may be greater than, or as great as, that of 

 England, the descent of the rain is limited to a few consecutive 

 months in the year, and during the remaining months a blazing 

 sun parches the vegetation. 



Somewhere to the east of the Volta River, the flora of 

 Upper Guinea merges into that of Lower Guinea, which (I 

 think it will be found) extends considerably north of the Congo 

 region, to the mouths of the Niger and the country of Lagos. 

 The birds and perhaps other groups of animals follow much 

 the same divisions, though here and there in individual cases 

 there is an overlapping. In the flora, at any rate, a good 

 many species or sub-species that are common to Dahome, 

 Lagos, the Niger Delta, the Cameroons, the Congo, and Angola 

 do not extend westwards into the Gold Coast Colony, still 

 less into Liberia. At the same time there are some exceptions 

 to this rule, such as Funtumia elastica, the rubber tree of Lagos. 

 The range of this species appears to extend from Uganda, in 

 East Central Africa, to the eastern half of I^iberia. Beyond 

 this — namely, the hinterland of Sino County — it has not as 

 yet been traced to the westward, and certain other trees and 

 birds have the same western limit — that is to say, they just 

 reach the eastern half of Liberia, and do not penetrate westwards 

 into Sierra Leone. East of the Niger Delta the forest region 

 of West Africa extends in a much broader belt two-thirds 

 of the distance across the continent, to the shores of Lake 

 Victoria, Tanganyika, and the northern part of the Zambezi- 

 Nyasa basin. In all probability the peculiar West African 

 flora of to-day, like the West African fauna, was once that of 

 all Africa south of the Sahara Desert, of Southern Arabia, possibly 



522 



