Animal life in Africa Author:James Stevenson-Hamilton Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER I THE GREAT GAME OF AFRICA Origin—Specific Variation—Distribution and Migratory Tendencies—Colouration Theories—The larger Carnivora in relation to... more » the Game—The Balance of Nature—Fear, natural and acquired. Among the great divisions into which the zoological world has been separated by scientists, the Ethiopian regionl is, at least within historical times, and with regard to highly specialised forms of larger mammals, the most lavishly endowed by nature, not only in respect of the numbers of individuals existing, but in the profusion of the genera and species which these individuals unite to compose. Not only is Africa pre-eminently the home of that multitudinous and perplexing portion of the family of bovidce popularly known as antelopes, but peculiarly her own are such strange old-world types as the hippopotamus and the giraffe, the latter, perhaps, the most strangely shaped creature on the whole surface of the earth, an animal, indeed, which, were its existence not testified to by the evidence of our own eyes, might well be deemed the fantastic creation of a Lewis Carroll. The several remarkably striped species of the genus cquus, too, called zebras, are the possession of Africa alone, and present in their gradual variation from type a most interesting study. Authorities are generally agreed that the remote ancestors of our modern Ethiopian mammals originally penetrated into the continent from the north-east, at a period when land and sea conditions perhaps differed very considerably from those now obtaining. Certainly the original invading families and genera would appear, after their arrival at their African goal, to have been, during many ages, sufficiently isolated to evolve, by slow and gradual change, into quite a bewildering series of species and ...« less