Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 11.djvu/896

856 must be aimed at the head, the most vulnerable points in that region being immediately behind the ear and in the eye. Everywhere regarded as a valuable prize, the natives employ a variety of methods in order to secure it, the most common of these being the use of an iron harpoon attached to a line. Allowing themselves to float down stream on a raft, the hippopotamus hunters no sooner reach the sleep ing herd than the expertest of them plunges his harpoon deep into the body of the selected victim. The light canoes are then launched from the raft, and with all speed the hunters make for the shore, bearing with them the line attached to the harpoon, which they further secure by giv ing it a turn round the trunk of a tree. Unable to free itself, the hippopotamus wastes its strength in impotent rage, itsipersecutors meanwhile assailing it with a shower of javelins under which its life blood gradually ebbs away, until at last it is hauled up dead or dying on the shore. Another native method of destroying those animals is by means of a trap known as the &quot;downfall,&quot; consisting of a heavy wooden beam armed at one end with a poisoned spear-head and suspended by the other to a forked pole or overhanging branch of a tree. The cord by which the beam is suspended descends to the path beneath, across which it lies in such a manner as to be set free the instant it is touched by the foot of the passing hippopotamus ; the beam thus liberated immediately descends, and the poisoned weapon passes into the head or back of the luckless beast, whose death in the adjacent stream takes place soon after. Such &quot;downfalls&quot; are placed over the paths by which the animals are in the habit of reaching their nightly feeding grounds. They are also occasionally taken by means of ordinary pitfalls, so dexterously concealed as often to entrap the unwary traveller. Although inferior in sagacity to the elephant, the hippopotamus is very far from being stupid, as is frequently proved by its remarkable adroit ness in the discovery and avoidance of traps and pitfalls, as well as in its timely migration from localities which, owing to the prevalence of the rifle, have become no longer tenable. It is said to be possessed of a remarkably tenacious memory, so that, according to Sir Andrew Smith, when once it has been assaulted in its watery dwelling and injured through incautiously exposing itself, it will rarely be guilty of the same indiscretion a second time, even although a very long period should elapse before its haunts are revisited. The female is less in size than the male, and is exceedingly shy, taking to the water with her young, which she usually carries astride on her neck, on the slightest alarm. It is only after long practice that the young become able to remain as long under the water as their parents, and for this reason the females while tending them come much oftener to the surface than their own necessities require. The period of gestation, as observed in females confined in the Zoological Gardens of London and Paris, extends to nearly eight months ; the young reach maturity in five years; and the full term of life in the species is believed to extend to thirty years. The male hippopotamus which recently (1878) died in the Zoological Hardens, London, was captured in August 1849 when only a few days old ; it had thus nearly attained the age of twenty-nine, while an examination of its dead body dis closed, says Professor Owen, &quot; no special morbid appearance to sugge3t that death from old age had been anticipated&quot; (Annals and Magazine of Nat. Hist., September 1 879). The flesh of the hippopotamus is generally considered a delicacy both by natives and colonists, although according to Livingstone there are certain tribes on the Zambesi who have as great an abhorrence of hippopotamus meat as Mahometans have of swine s flesh. The fatty matter lying between the skin and the muscles is one of the purest of animal fats, and was formerly in great request among the Cape colonists when as yet those amphibians abounded in the rivers of that colony. The skin of the hippopotamus is turned to profitable account in the manufacture of elastic whips, which are in great demand throughout the African continent. The skin, according to Schweinfurth, wheu fresh is cut into long quadrilateral stripes, which when half-dried are trimmed with a knife and afterwards hammered out, like iron on an anvil, into round whips. As several hundreds can be made from a single hide, that part is of considerable commercial value. Still more valu able are the tusks and incisor teeth, which, from their extreme hardness and the fact that they do not readily become yellow, were once largely used in the manufacture of artificial teeth. The hippopotamus formerly abounded in such rivers as the Nile, the Niger, the Senegal, and most of the rivers of South Africa. It is now, however, becom ing gradually more restricted in its distribution, having disappeared altogether from the Egyptian Nile, although still abundant in its Abyssinian tributaries,—as well as from the rivers of Cape colony. The Liberian hippopotamus (Ch&ropsis liberiensis), the only other existing member of the family, is exceedingly rare, having been only known until recently from the two skulls on which the genus and species were founded. It differs from the common species in possessing only one pair of incisors in each jaw instead of two, and in several other minor points. A few years ago a young specimen of this rare species was brought alive to England from the Scarcies river, north of Sierra Leone, but it died soon after landing. The species is found on the west coast of Africa and on certain of the rivers flowing into Lake Chad. Although there are thus only two living species, both of which are confined to Africa, the hippopotamus family was both larger and more widely distributed in former periods of the earth s history, fossil remains of at least nine species having been found in the Tertiary deposits of Europe and India. In Europe they occur as far north as Belgium and the south of England, but they are found nowhere in such abundance as in the island of Sicily, from which they were formerly exported in shiploads to England and France, where they were used in the manufacture of lamp-black and manure. The occurrence of those animals in a place which they could not possibly have reached had it always been an island, is regarded as one of the many proofs that dry land existed during some portion at least of the Tertiary period between Italy and Africa.  

