188 
SAVAGE SUDAN 
quite 5 feet. Mr Norman Smith tells me he shot one on 
White Nile that taped 6oi inches. We have no more 
valuable or reliable work than Rowland Wards 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. 
