A few years later Cornwallis Harris visited South Africa. In his great work on the results of his journey subsequently published, this celebrated sportsman and naturalist devotes his third plate to the illustration of a group of Springbucks, which he describes at the period of his writing (1840) as then still abundant in the Colony and “distributed over the arid plains beyond it in unlimited herds.” “Amongst the many striking novelties,” Cornwallis Harris writes, “which present themselves to the eye of the traveller in Southern Africa there are, perhaps, few objects more conspicuous or more beautiful than the dancing herds of graceful Springbucks which speckle the broad plains of the interior.” “Matchless in the symmetry of its form, the Springbok is measurelessly the most elegant and remarkable species of the comprehensive group to which it pertains. The dazzling contrast betwixt the lively cinnamon of its back and the snowy whiteness of the lower parts is agreeably heightened by the intensely rich chestnut bands which traverse the flanks--its dark beaming eye, with its innocent and lamb-like expression of face, and the showy folds of gossamer on the haunches--displayed or concealed at the animal’s volition--combining to render it one of the most beautiful objects in the animal creation. As the traveller advances over the trackless expanse, hundreds of this delicately formed antelope bound away on either side of his path with meteor-like and sportive velocity, winging their bird-like flight by a quick succession of those singularly elastic leaps which have given rise to its colonial appellation, and which enable it to surpass, as well in swiftness as in grace, almost every other mammiferous quadruped.