The book of antelopes, vol. 2 (of 4)Sclater, Philip Lutley
Science
The book of antelopes, vol. 2 (of 4)
Sclater, Philip Lutley
Antelopes
Height at withers about 29 or 30 inches. General form comparatively
slender and delicate. Fur soft and woolly, though not very thick.
Colour dull pale grey all over, the head and limbs tending rather
towards fawn-colour. Ears very long and narrow, their backs grey.
Throat and belly similar to and scarcely paler than the back; chin,
however, with a distinct blackish patch. Lower part of limbs slightly
and inconspicuously darker in front. Tail reaching to about the level
of the groin, rather bushy; fawn-grey above near the body, white below
and at the end.
Horns slender, barely 2½ inches in circumference at the base, strongly
ringed on their lower half, smooth at the tips; rising nearly
vertically, and slightly curving forwards. In length they ordinarily
attain to about 8 or 9 inches, though some of 11½ inches have been
recorded.
Dimensions of an old male skull:--Basal length 7·35 inches, greatest
breadth 3·95, muzzle to orbit 5.
_Female._ Like the male, but hornless.
_Hab._ S. Africa, south of the Zambesi.
Closely allied to the Reedbucks, and, in fact, hardly differing from
them in general structure, except in its nearly straight horns and
the want of the naked patch beneath the ears, is the Vaal Rhébok of
the South-African colonists, so named by the Dutch settlers from its
fancied resemblance to the Roebuck of Europe (_Capreolus caprea_),
and so called by Le Vaillant, Sparrman, and the older authors.
Bechstein in 1799 appears to be the first author who gave it a
scientific name, and he wisely chose for it that of “_capreolus_”
following the precedent of the vernacular. In this he was followed by
Thunberg, Afzelius, and other subsequent writers on the Antelopes, and
the name has been mostly accepted and appended to the generic term
_Pelea_ bestowed upon it by Gray in 1850, taken from “Peeli,” the
Bechuana name of this Antelope.
In 1822, however, Desmoulins, in his article on Antelopes in the
‘Dictionnaire Classique d’Histoire Naturelle,’ redescribed the species
as _Antilope lanata_, from specimens transmitted to Paris from the
Cape by Delalande; and two years subsequently Burchell, who had met
with this Antelope during his travels in Bechuanaland, gave it the new
name _Antilope villosa_; but neither of these appellations has
attained much circulation.
The earliest recognizable figures of the Vaal Rhébok were published
about 1829, when Lichtenstein gave representations of both sexes in his
‘Darstellung der Thiere’ from specimens in the Berlin Museum.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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