Thirty years ago scarcely anything but the name was known of the Ogowé River; but between 1860 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 Lopé, in the Okanda country. The survey of the upper parts 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. Duméril 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 1867[2] I described the collection made by Walker on the Ogowé, 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 "Étude sur la Faune ichthyologique de l’Ogôoué," 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 æneofuscus, Gthr.
- Eleotris senegalensis, Stdchr.
- Ophiocephalus obscurus, Gthr.
- Ctenopoma gabonense, sp. n. (?=Ct. multispine, Sauv., nec Ptrs.).
- ——— nanum, sp. n.
- ——— Kingsleyæ, sp. n. (?=Ct. Petherici, Sauv., nec Gthr.).
