188 SAVAGE SUDAN 



quite 5 feet. Mr Norman Smith tells me he shot one on 

 White Nile that taped 6o\ inches. We have no more 

 valuable or reliable work than Rowland Ward's Records 

 of Big-Game ; but as regards the Nile buffalo, the writer 

 seems to have got astray in several of his facts. 



Colonel Roosevelt, in his African Game Trails, has 

 some amusingly drastic remarks on the folly of attaching 

 specific values to what are merely trifling individual 

 variations in the form or measurements of horns and 

 such-like details. Some German professor, it appears, 

 had created fifteen or twenty classes of African buffalo, 

 each distinguished by a separate Latin name, and all 

 based upon just such trivial differences. But when the 

 great ex-President had secured three specimens from a 

 single herd on the Athi Plains (British East Africa), he 

 found that two, if not all three, belonged to separate 

 breeds breeds, that is, as made in Germany ! To 

 this criticism of Roosevelt's, the Hun replied by naming 

 yet two more ''subspecies" from this identical herd, thus 

 making five distinct races of buffalo all inhabiting a single 

 papyrus-swamp of 15 miles in length by a maximum of 

 one in breadth ! 'Tis a sorry sort of science, typical of the 

 muddle-headed mentality of the modern German, a com- 

 bination of super-egoism with empty arrogance. Let 

 those poor Britishers who would emulate such follies take 

 timely warning of their consequences in a larger field. 



The African buffalo is subject to an exceptional 

 degree of variation as between individuals ; moreover, 

 between the deeply-arched horns of the South-Zambesi 

 races and their relatively flat sweep in Sudan occurs an 

 intermediate gradation. My own knowledge is insufficient 

 to define that gradation as absolutely complete, though 

 I believe it to be practically so. To recognise such incon- 

 stant characters as having any systematic value would 

 involve naming, say every fifth beast ; thus, if the bovine 

 population of Africa be five million head, we should 

 require a million separate Latin labels for buffaloes alone. 



