SOME NATURAL HISTORY IN WHICH IT IS REVEALED THAT A SING-SING WATERBUCK IS NOT A SINGING TOPI, AND THAT A TOPI IS NOT A SPECIES OF HEAD-DRESS While reading an account of the trophies secured by Colonel Roosevelt on the Guas Ngishu Plateau, I was mystified by seeing the name of an animal I had never heard tell of--a singing topi.

For a time I puzzled over this strange creature and finally evolved a satisfactory explanation of how the animal made its appearance in the despatches.

Briefly, "there haint no sich animal," as the old farmer said when he saw his first dromedary in a circus; it was merely a mistake, due to the telegraphic abbreviations which foreign correspondents employ to save cable tolls.
What the correspondent meant to say was that the colonel had secured a sing-sing waterbuck _and_ a topi.

The word "waterbuck" was omitted because he assumed that everybody at home would know that a "sing-sing" was a species of waterbuck, wherein he was mistaken, for comparatively few people in America know what a sing-sing is, or, for that matter, what a topi is, or what a Uganda cob is.

When his despatch had been transmitted through several operators on its way to the States the word "sing-sing" became "singing" and was supposed to be an adjective describing the topi.