Liberia <*^ 



The same doubt exists about any species of horse being 

 indigenous in the western third of Africa. So far, no form of 

 zebra or wild ass has ever been collected for science west of Lake 

 Chad. When the present writer visited the Tunisian Sahara, 

 much-travelled Berbers or Tawareq assured him that far to 

 the south, in the western Sahara Desert, there were wild asses, 

 similar, in the description they gave, to the wild ass of Nubia ; 

 and seeing the identical conditions of the country west of Lake 

 Chad with the country east of it, it is difficult to understand 

 why the ass should have stopped short in its westward range. 

 Still farther south, in the better watered lands, it is equally 

 difficult to understand why there should be no zebras in the 

 Niger Basin and at the head-waters of the Senegal, the Gambia, 

 and the Sierra Leone rivers ; but so far, although many familiar 

 East African mammals have been obtained on the Upper Gambia 

 (such as the giraffe, which is also reported to exist on the 

 Mandingo Plateau) no trace of either zebra or rhinoceros has 

 yet been obtained. 



One of the peculiar forms of Liberia is the Pygmy 

 Hippopotamus. This relatively rare creature probably exists 

 also in the rivers of the Ivory Coast and of Eastern Sierra Leone, 

 though it has never yet been recorded from either country. 

 The big hippopotamus seems to be completely absent from 

 this part of forested West Africa. I cannot say whether it 

 has ever been found on the rivers of the Gold Coast, but it is 

 certainly present east of Dahome in all the important streams, 

 and is of course abundant in parts of the Niger, Cameroons 

 and Congo, whilst it was once very common in the Senegal, 

 the Gambia, and in the rivers to the west of Sierra Leone, as 

 well as being abundant in the Upper Niger and in all the 

 Niger affluents. But although in some works of natural history 

 it has been asserted that the big hippopotamus was found on 



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