218 AFRICAN NATURE NOTES CHAP. 



African bull giraffe, too, which once used to stand 

 in the Mammalian Gallery of the Natural History 

 Museum at South Kensington, and which always 

 appeared to me to be a magnificent specimen in 

 point of size, only measured as set up 1 7 feet 5 

 inches from the ground to the top of the horns. I 

 took this measurement myself with the aid of a 

 ladder. I know that in the Tring Museum the 

 Hon. Walter Rothschild has a specimen of a 

 giraffe from Southern Angola, which measures 18 

 feet 4 inches as it stands. But I am not convinced 

 that the animal actually stood that height when 

 alive. In modern taxidermy a framework model of 

 an animal is first built, and the skin then stretched 

 over it. The man who shot and preserved the skin 

 of the giraffe now in the Tring Museum said that it 

 stood 1 8 feet 4 inches, and it has been set up to 

 that height ; but if the measurement was taken 

 carelessly, or over the curves of the animal's body, 

 there would be no difficulty in stretching the skin 

 so as to obtain the height required. My esteemed 

 friend the late Mr. A. H. Neumann, than whom 

 there never lived a better authority upon African 

 game, when speaking- of the northern giraffe in 

 TJie Great and Small Game of Africa, says : "It 

 may possibly be somewhat smaller (than the southern 

 species), for the height of the full-grown males 1 

 have shot averaged about 16 feet, that of the cows 

 14 feet." And he further says : " And though I have 

 not found these dimensions exceeded respectively 

 in any of the southern specimens of either sex I 

 have myself killed anywhere, I have read in the 

 accounts of other hunters of considerably taller 

 animals being obtained in parts of South Africa." 



Personally, grounding my belief on the size of 

 the magnificent old bull giraffe which once stood in 

 the Mammalian Gallery of the Natural History 

 Museum at South Kensington, and the measure- 



