Skull (♂): basal length 4·7 inches, greatest breadth 2·5, anterior edge of orbit to muzzle 2·7.
This species shows a certain tendency to the peculiar coloration of the rump characteristic of C. melanorheus; the colour-contrasts of black and white of the latter, however, are in this case only dark brown and light brown respectively.
Hab. Coast of West Africa from Gambia to the Gold Coast.
This Duiker, which is of considerably smaller dimensions than the two previous species, and of a nearly uniform slaty-brown colour, is likewise a West-African species, but seems to have a rather more extended range along the coast. Whether it is really the Guévei of A damson and Buffon is, to say the least of it, very doubtful, but it is probably the species figured under that name by F. Cuvier in 1826 from a specimen from Senegal then living in the Jardin des Plantes. Cuvier referred this specimen to the Antilope pygmæa of former authors, but, as we know from Sir Victor Brooke’s excellent article on this subject (P. Z. S. 1872, p. 637), that specific name properly belongs to the Royal Antelope of Western Africa, of which we shall give an account in a subsequent part of this work.
In 1827, in his volume on the order Ruminantia in ‘Griffith’s Animal Kingdom,’ Major Hamilton Smith described a female of this species which had been brought home from Sierra Leone by Col. Charles Maxwell and dedicated it to that gentleman as Antilope maxwelli. In a subsequent volume of the same work, containing a synopsis of the species of mammals, Hamilton Smith not only repeated the description, but added, as apparently different, a description of another young specimen from the same country, and classed it as a different species under the name Antilope philantomba. Under this last designation also this Antelope is mentioned by Ogilby in the ‘Proceedings’ of the Zoological Society for 1836, where he gives some particulars respecting two females which had lived for some time in the Society’s Gardens.
At about this date also there were several examples of the “Philantomba” as it is commonly called in Zoological Gardens, living in the Derby Menagerie at Knowsley. In Waterhouse Hawkins’s drawings of the animals in this splendid collection, which were subsequently edited by Gray, Maxwell’s Duiker appears to have been mentioned under three different names—first as C. maxwelli (plate xi. a), secondly as C. punctulatus (p. 11), and thirdly as C. whitfieldi (plate xi. fig. 2). So far as we can tell all these names must refer to the present species, which seems to vary considerably between youth and age.
Many living specimens of this Duiker have also been received by the Zoological Society of London, besides those mentioned by Mr. Ogilby. Although in nature shy and retiring it does well in captivity, and becomes very tame when petted. It has frequently bred in the Society’s Menagerie, and specimens are registered as having been born there in 1867, 1871, 1872, 1873, and 1874. It is also well known in several of the Zoological Gardens on the Continent. Of late years there have been many examples of this little Antelope in the Zoological Gardens at Amsterdam, and there are at present two males in that Collection.
Fig. 20.
Skull of Cephalophus maxwelli.