ALTT 
ZOOLOGY 
THE fauna of Liberia has been studied in early years by Biittikofer and his 
assistants, and their descriptions, which were collected and published in 1890, 
and those made and compiled by Johnston in 1906, have laid the foundation 
for our zoological knowledge of the country. However, neither Biittikofer nor 
Johnston travelled very far into the interior; indeed their observations were 
mostly confined to the region not more than thirty miles from the coast. There- 
fore, it was important and desirable that observations should be made further 
inland in the central parts of the country, in order to compare them with those 
already made on the coast or in the coastal region. Such inland studies were 
made upon the present expedition. 
Johnston remarks of the coastal region that what strikes the traveller most 
in respect to the fauna of Liberia is its absence. He says that in no part of 
Africa that he has visited has there seemed at first sight a more striking lack of 
animal life. 
This impression one retains to a considerable extent when one travels in 
the interior of the country, where, with the exception of a few birds about the 
plantations, there appears to be a marked absence of wild life in general and 
of big game in particular. History tells us that in the earlier years the reverse 
was true at least of the coastal regions, and that, on the contrary, wild game 
—antelopes, buffaloes, and elephants — was plentiful. The absence during 
many years of any self-restraint on the part of the natives in the matter of 
hunting, together with the natural comparative paucity there of both domestic 
and wild animals of every sort, is probably responsible for the present condi- 
tions, for the interior tribes feeling frequently the scarcity or absence of meat, 
apparently killed for food every form of animal life they could lay their hands 
on, and only in exceptional instances attempted to raise cattle or sheep. The 
natural lack of certain wild game may also be due in part to the fact that the 
West African forest, which passes through Liberia is cut off by hundreds of 
miles from the next great forest region to the east, the country between Old 
Calabar, the Cameroons, and the Upper Congo. Moreover, the West African 
forest region is to a considerable extent isolated to the southeast from the 
Ashanti Forest by the grassy plains of the Ivory Coast, and to the west and 
northwest is partly separated from the forests of Portuguese and French Guinea 
by the highlands of Futajalon. It may be that from these and other deforested 
areas the larger part of the wild game in earlier years travelled eastward rather 
than westward. Whatever the reason, one finds today nowhere in the interior 
of Liberia any abundance of wild game; there are no plains or open fields 
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