T 



CHAPTER XII 



ZOOLOGY 

 Mammals 



HE8E countries round about the lakes whose waters unite to form the 

 -L- greatest river in Africa, must have been in tlie past, firstly for beasts, 

 and secondly for men, the critical point in Africa, the meeting place of 

 north and south, of east and west, the focus from which modern mammalia 

 and African man radiated all over Southern Africa, after a concentration 

 within the north-eastern portion of the continent. Here for a time, no 

 doubt, paused the European and Asiatic fauna of big beasts which glacial 

 epochs or the attacks of man when he had emerged from the ape drove from 

 India, Western Asia, and Mediterranean Europje into tropical Africa, at 

 that time peopled by the humbler fauna represented at the present day in 

 Madagascar. Creatures like the okapi, whose nearest relations are found 

 fossil in Egypt, Greece, and Western Asia, possibly got no farther than the 

 Semliki forests which lie along the south-western border of the Uganda 

 Protectorate. The other big beasts of the north and east made their way 

 from the countries round about the sources of the Nile into the savannahs 

 and forests of West Africa, and into the park-lands and grassy steppes of 

 the southern half of the continent. When palteontological researches have 

 shown us what the mammalian fauna of Uganda was in the Pliocene and 

 Pleistocene Epochs, we shall probably find that this fauna made a long stay 

 and developed many of its strange existing forms in and near these territories 

 grouped round about the great lakes and that changeable river, the Nile — 

 a river which in all probability once formed a huge lake in the Egyptian 

 Sudan, and at one time may have flowed into the Eed Sea, at another may 

 have communicated with Lake Chad. 



One reason, no doubt, why the Uganda territories became so much of 

 a focus and centre from which beasts and men expanded their range over 

 Western and Southern Africa, and a centre from which languages and 

 civilisation overflowed and trickled, or rushed, in these directions, was no 

 doubt the existence of that great Congo Forest which even at the present 

 day stretches very nearly without interruption from the coast-lands of the 



