Introduction 



furiously than ever since the Great War, the British, German, 

 and the Boer settlers have been exterminating with reckless 

 blood-lust a most magnificent mammalian fauna ; South 

 Africa, outside the forests of the Central region, offered a 

 singular resemblance in its extravagant mammalian forms to 

 the beasts of prehistoric Algeria, and of Abyssinia, Somaliland, 

 and equatorial East Africa. Vestiges of this wealth were 

 encountered by the author of this book and have been seen 

 by many of those who from the days of Speke and Grant 

 onwards have penetrated East Africa up to the borders of 

 the Congo forests. 



Not a few of the beasts and birds, living and extinct, 

 which have been found in North Africa, Abyssinia, the 

 eastern Sudan, Somaliland, and equatorial East Africa down 

 to the sixth degree of S. latitude, are not only absent entirely 

 from the central basin of the Congo but do not reappear till the 

 Zambezi has been crossed and the South African sphere has 

 been entered. A somewhat similar gap in distribution may 

 be noted in the Americas where there may be great resem- 

 blances between the existing mammalian fauna of South 

 America and that of pre-Glacial North America, with very 

 little (to-day) in the way of living or fossil forms in Central 

 America to connect them, the fauna not having cared to linger 

 long in the attenuated connecting parts. 



But in Central Africa there has been no lack of space for the 

 maintenance of the southward-tending beasts and birds : 

 we can only assume that the rather narrow connecting belt 

 between north and south in East Africa has been caused by 

 the existence of a vast recent lake over the inner Congo basin. 

 Similarly, to account for the present distribution of beasts, 

 birds, reptiles and fresh-water fish between North Africa 



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