94 PROF. A. CABKEEA ON 



based on the " Spotted Hy«3na"of Pennant *, and this author 

 gave no definite locality, saying only that the animal is fovmd in 

 " Guinea, Ethiopia, and the Cape." That indication practically 

 embraces all the African countries known in Pennant's time, 

 excepting only Barbary and Egypt. As to the original de- 

 scription, made from a specimen shown in London some years 

 before, it runs thus : — 



" Short black mane : hair on the body short and smooth : ears 

 short and a little pointed ; their outside black, inside cinereous : 

 face, and upper part of the head, black : body and limbs reddish 

 brown, marked with distinct round black spots ; the hind legs 

 with transverse black bars ; tail short, black, and full of hair." 



Now, I have never seen, nor found described, a Spotted Hysena 

 with black mane. Young specimens commonly have dai-k hairs 

 in it, producing a general blackish tinge, but it seems clear that 

 Pennant's specimen was not young, as in the description it is 

 afterwards stated that it was bigger than the striped species, and 

 the author says about the latter in a previous page that it is 

 larger than a big dog. It is therefore necessary to suppose either 

 that Pennant spoke from memory and forgot some details of the 

 coloration, or that the actual specimen represented a form quite 

 unknown to modern naturalists. The latter view being a very 

 unlikely one, I prefer to think that the desci'iption was written 

 from memory only, under the impression of a reddish-brown 

 animal spotted with black, and perhaps a not quite developed 

 specimen with a little of the juvenile dark hair in the mane. 



This determination being adopted, it seems to me very probable 

 that the specimen alluded to came from Senegambia, although 

 this locality is not mentioned among those given by Pennant as 

 inhabited by Spotted Hytenas. Senegambia and the Cape were, 

 during the eighteenth century, the two countries that chiefly and 

 almost exclusively furnished the European menageries with 

 African animals. But in the Cape Hytena the ground-colour 

 is a dirty yellowish which nobody would call reddish brown, 

 whereas this rather indefinite designation may be correctly 

 applied to the peculiar colour, intermediate between dark 

 cinnamon and raw umber, of the Senegambian Hysena. The fact 

 that Pennant did not include Senegambia in the habitat of the 

 species is of little, if any, impoi-tance, as he compiled the geo- 

 graphical distribution from the works of Bosman, Kolbe, &c., and 

 Avas evidently unaware of the provenance of the specimen he saw 

 in London. In his ' Game Animals of Africa,' Mr. Lydekker says 

 that the typical Hycena crocuta is the form found fi'om Southern 

 Egypt, across Central Africa, to Senegal in the west and the 

 Transvaal in the south. I cannot agi-ee entirely with such a 

 conclusion. As will be seen below. Spotted Hyaenas fi'om the 

 Nile Basin and East Centiul Afi-ica ai-e verj' different in coloui- 

 from the animal described by Pennant and Erxleben, and therefore 



* ' History of Qiuulrupcds; i. (1781) p. 252. 



