THE OKAPI 
OKAPIA JOHNSTONI 
LTHOUGH Sir H. M. Stanley, Colonel Marchand and Dr Junker 
all heard vague reports as to the existence of a large 
/ animal in the dim forests of the Congo still unknown 
/ to science, they none of them succeeded in obtaining 
/ specimens of this strange creature, and the honour of 
di first sending to Europe the complete skin as well as the 
skull of an okapi undoubtedly rests with Sir H. H. Johnston. The attention 
of this keen and observant naturalist had some months earlier in the same 
year (1900) been drawn to two pieces of striped skin worn by natives as 
belts at a Belgian post near the Semliki river. These he bought and sent 
home to Dr Sclater, the President of the Zoological Society of London at 
that time, who, thinking they had been cut from the hide of some unknown 
species of zebra, named the still unknown animal Equus Johnstoni. When, 
however, the first complete skin and skull of an okapi ever seen in Europe 
was submitted to Sir E. Ray Lankester, that great authority pronounced 
it to belong to a genus of mammals now extinct upon the earth, but 
related to the giraffe. The new animal was subsequently named Okapia 
Johnstoni , in honour of the man through whose acumen and energy it had 
at last, towards the close of the nineteenth century, been made known to 
European naturalists. 
Since that time a number of skins and skeletons of this shy and retiring 
creature have been brought to Europe, and it is now known that the first 
example obtained by Sir H. H. Johnston, which was hornless, was a 
female, the males invariably possessing two small horns, which, though 
covered with skin, as in the giraffe, on the sides, show in adult specimens 
the bare bone at their summits. 
The okapi appears to be related to, and may possibly be the lineal 
descendant of, one or other of certain large ruminants the remains of 
which have been discovered in the tertiary deposits of Greece and India. 
All these prehistoric forms and many missing links between them and 
their last -surviving relative have long since disappeared from the face of 
the earth, and only its own shy and retiring habits, added to the perpetual 
gloom and thick undergrowth of the vast equatorial forests in which it 
lives has saved the okapi from a like fate. From time immemorial the 
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