The book of antelopes, vol. 4 (of 4)Sclater, Philip Lutley
Science
The book of antelopes, vol. 4 (of 4)
Sclater, Philip Lutley
Antelopes
Long mane of dark hair extending almost from chin along throat, chest,
and each side of belly, and fringing the front of the thigh almost to
the hock, and the back of it up to the root of the tail. There is also
a dorsal mane extending from the nape to the neck, reversed from the
base of the neck; the hairs black or brown in colour along the nape of
the neck from the occiput to the shoulder, tipped with white from the
shoulders to the tail. Tail cervine, thickly hairy throughout.
Horns black, pale amber-coloured at the tips, ridged in the basal
half; about 29 inches long round the curve, and 24 in a straight line;
usually with a single, and rarely with a double, curvature.
The skull of an adult male gives the following measurements:—Basal
length 12 inches, orbit to muzzle a little over 7, width almost 5.
_Female_ without horns and strikingly different from the male
in colour. General colour a bright chestnut. Sides of the body and
haunches marked with about eleven white stripes, those behind shoulder
reaching almost to the ventral surface; ventral surface pale yellow; a
few white spots on the haunches. Nose marked with a broad black band,
which extends laterally on to the muzzle; a narrow black dorsal stripe,
extending from the occiput to the root of the tail, intersected with
white where the lateral stripes cross it. No mane on any part of neck,
body, or hind-quarters.
_Hab._ South-eastern Africa, from Zululand to Southern Nyasaland.
The discoverer of this fine Antelope, the late Mr. George French Angas,
was an accomplished artist and traveller, and the author of several
books on Africa and Australia. Angas first met with this species
on the northern shores of St. Lucia Bay, in Zululand, during his
journeyings in that district in 1847. Here, he tells us, it inhabits
the low undulating hills, scattered with mimosa-bushes, which border
the northern shores of the Bay. On returning to England, Angas showed
his notes and sketches of this Antelope to the late Dr. Gray, who
assured him of its being an animal new to science, and communicated
them to the Zoological Society of London in the name of the discoverer.
Angas was not successful in obtaining specimens for himself, as the
Boers, he tells us, refused to part with them, and the two plates
which illustrate his paper in the Zoological Society’s ‘Proceedings’
were lithographed by Waterhouse Hawkins from his notes and sketches.
It should also be mentioned that the Antelope was named, not after
Angas himself, but after his father, Mr. George Fife Angas, of South
Australia, who, we are told, had always “taken great interest” in his
son’s travels and researches in natural history. In a folio work called
‘Kaffirs Illustrated,’ published in 1849, Angas again figured this
Antelope, on a plate containing representations of the male, female,
and young, but did not furnish any further particulars concerning its
life and habits.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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