MAMMALS OF LIBERIA 619 
use of a poisoned arrow having a shaft about eighteen inches long, and a tip of 
soft iron, somewhat spade-shaped. The shaft is thrust down the barrel of an old 
smooth-bore musket, and shot into the elephant’s body at close range. ‘The 
animal at once starts off and the hunter follows its winding course in and out 
through the undergrowth until the poison takes effect and the elephant falls. 
The hunter returns on the animal’s trail, notifies the village, and all the men set 
forth following the same winding course through the forest till they come to the 
place where the body lies. Here camp is made, and they stay by until all the 
meat is cut off, partly smoked or dried, and then pack it back to the village leav- 
ing only a few well-cleaned large bones. If the existence of a really small species 
of elephant is to be established, it must rest on the examination of skulls and 
teeth that are fully adult and yet of small size, while it would further be expected 
that there would be some other external peculiarities that would make it more 
than merely a small edition of the well-known African species. 
Dr. George C. Shattuck calls our attention to the fact that the large seba- 
ceous gland found directly behind the eye of an elephant frequently contains small 
pieces of twigs that apparently entered the orifice of the gland while the animal 
was feeding or perhaps scratching its head, and have broken off. This gland is 
branching in form but discharges through a single opening. Both Dr. Shattuck 
and Dr. Strong found such twigs in two of the elephants they shot, while a third 
was without them. Geoffroy Catchpole, a white hunter, said he had frequently 
found sticks in these glands in elephants he had shot and Alexander Barnes 
mentions it in his book on the Kivu country. Samples of these sticks from ele- 
phants shot in the Congo by Dr. Shattuck varied from about 15 to 40 mm. in 
length and were hard and brown. Their occurrence does not seem to be generally 
known among the natives or white hunters. ° 
SIRENIA 
TRICHECHIDAE Manatees 
Trichechus senegalensis (Desmarest). West African Manatee 
Manatus senegalensis Desmarest, Nouv. Dict. d’Hist. Nat., vol. 17, p. 262, 1817: Senegal. 
General appearance whale-like, the tail broadly expanded into a rounded lobe for swimming; 
color, bluish black with a tinge of olive green on back and sides, becoming yellowish below. Coast 
from Senegal to Gaboon. 
The West African manatee is well known to the Liberians, who occasionally 
capture one, but we neither saw nor heard anything of it during our brief stay 
on the coast. According to Bittikofer, whose description of its coloring is trans- 
cribed above, it sometimes comes into the St. Paul’s River in considerable schools 
as far up as the lowest rapids; two adults were taken in the Mesurado River the 
year previous to his visit; while it is occasionally seen in the Marfa and Cape 
Mount rivers. He secured a fresh specimen from the latter stream at Robert- 
port that weighed about 500 pounds and measured 2640 mm. in total length. Its 
stomach contained only vegetable matter. 
