Thirty years ago scarcely anything but the name w9.s known
of the Ogowe River; but between i860 and 1870 French
officials and traders began to trace its course inland, discovering
a long stretch of rapids in its middle course which render
navigation dangerous and, at places, impossible to any vessel
larger than a boat. Among those earlier explorers an
Englishman, Mr. R. B. N. Walker, took a prominent part,1
making two expeditions in 1866 and 1873, and penetrating
to Lope, in the Okanda country. The survey of the upper
par.ts of the river was completed by Messrs. de Brazza and
Balay.
All that was known before the year 1860 of the reptiles and
fishes of the Gaboon country has been collected by Aug.
Dumeril in his memoir “ Reptiles et Poissons de l’Afrique
Occidentale,” in Arch. Mus. vol. x. I find that in the list at
the end of his memoir he mentions eight freshwater fishes
from Gaboon, all being from the littoral portion of the country.
In 18672 I described the collection made by Walker on the
Ogowe, adding seventeen species to its fauna, ten of which
were new. This list was increased by six others found by
Buchholz and determined by Peters (MB. Berlin Akad. 1876,
p. 244); Two years later M. Sauvage commenced to publish
the results of his examination of the materials that had
accumulated in the Paris Museum (Bull. Soc. Philom. 1878,
pp. 90-103), giving a complete account of the then knowledge
of this fish-fauna in his memoir “ Etude sur la Faune ichthy-
ologique de l’Ogooue,” in N. Arch. Mus. iii. 1880. In it he
enumerates thirty-seven species, a part of which, however, he
knew only from the papers of his predecessors. This number
has been increased by him in a last supplementary list to
forty-six (Bull. Soc. Zool. France, ix. 1884).
In the present paper I have added to the Gaboon fauna
from Miss Kingsley’s collection the following sixteen
species:—
Gobius ceneofuscus, Gthr.
Eleotris senegalensis, Stdchr.
Ophiocephalus obscuvus, Gthr.
Cte?iopoma gabonense, sp. n. (? = Ct. multispine, Sauv.,
nec Ptrs.).
nanum, sp. n.
Kingsleyce, sp. n. (? = Ct. Petherici, Sauv., nec Gthr.).
1 Bull. Soc. G6ogr. Paris, 1879, p. 114.
2 Ann. & Mag. Nat. Hist. 1867, xx. p. 109. In this paper the name of
the river is misspelt Ogome..