British Museum (Natural History): Acquisitions

Abstract

AMONG recent additions to the zoological collections is the skull of a swamp deer (Rucervus duvauceli) from India presented by Mr. D. H. Keelan. The specimen is remarkable for the symmetry of the antlers. A collection of mammals formed by the late Captain H. D. Hilton-Simpson has been presented by Mrs. Hilton-Simpson ; included in this series is a mounted head and a skull of a race of buffalo named by the late Richard Lydekker after Captain Hilton-Simpson, Syncerus coffer simpsoni. A number of mammals from Kenya Colony, including a specimen of a rare crested bush rat, Lophiomys testudo, and twenty small mammals from Sierra Leone are the gifts respectively of Colonel C. H. Stockley and Mr. R. R. Glanville. An 'ivory pearl' from the tusk of a Uganda elephant has been presented by Mr. Q. O. Grogan. This concretion is an especially large one and shaped rather like a small potato. Among recent donations received from the Rowland Ward Trustees is an African tiger cat, Felis celidogaster, mounted for the galleries, and the skull of an African dwarf buffalo. A splendid group of slender prisms of stibnite (antimony sulphide) and another specimen of baryte on stibnite from Baia Sprie, Rumania, are the most interesting of the purchases made for the Department of Mineralogy. The Geological Survey of India has presented to the same Department three samples of different grades of diamondiferous gravel from the Karnool District, Madras Presidency. Diamonds in this district are obtained from alluvial deposits and also from a conglomerate at the base of the Karnool Series among rocks of Precambrian age. These gravels have been presented in response to a request for specimens to illustrate the modes of occurrence of diamond, which is the subject of the first section of the diamond case (near entrance to the Mineral Gallery) recently rearranged