The book of antelopes, vol. 4 (of 4)Sclater, Philip Lutley
Science
The book of antelopes, vol. 4 (of 4)
Sclater, Philip Lutley
Antelopes
The next author after Pallas to mention this Antelope appears to
have been Allamand, who made various contributions to an edition of
Buffon’s ‘Histoire Naturelle,’ issued in Holland by Schneider in 1766
and the following years. Allamand, however, carelessly confounded this
South-African Antelope with the _Gazella gutturosa_ of Siberia,
of which the native name is Tzeiran or Dzéren (see Book of Ant. III.
p. 84), and adopted the same name for it. Allamand’s figure of his
“Tzeiran” was taken from a mounted specimen in the Cabinet d’Histoire
Naturelle of J. C. Sylvius von Lennep, of Harlem, which on the death
of the owner had passed by bequest to the Société Hollandaise des
Sciences of that city. This specimen, when in skin, had been obtained
from a dealer who did not know whence it came, but from the mode of its
preparation it was believed by Allamand to have been brought from the
Cape.
Our countryman Pennant, in his ‘History of Quadrupeds,’ of which the
first edition was published in 1781, gave a third original description
of this species, which he called the “Blue Antelope.” It was taken,
he tells us, from a skin bought at Amsterdam, and said to have been
obtained from the Cape of Good Hope. Pennant fully recognized its
identity with Buffon’s “Tzeiran,” and remarked on the use of this
erroneous Asiatic name for it.
Sparrman, who arrived at the Cape in 1772 and subsequently made a long
journey into the interior, tells us in his narrative[2] of having
found a skin of the Blue-buck (which he identified with Pallas’s
_A. leucophæa_ and Pennant’s “Blue Antelope”) preserved at
“Krakeel-rivier,” but he does not appear to have met with it alive
himself.
But a rather later explorer of the Cape Colony, the well-known French
naturalist François Le Vaillant, author of the ‘Oiseaux d’Afrique’ and
many other ornithological works, was more fortunate. As Le Vaillant
appears to have been the only traveller known to have himself obtained
an example of this now extinct species, we will extract from the first
volume of his ‘Voyage d’Afrique’ what he has written on this subject.
On December 18th, 1781, Le Vaillant left Capetown to explore the
country to the east called “Hottentot Holland.” A few days later,
after crossing the river Sonder-end, and passing through the valley of
Soete-Melck, he arrived at a place called “Tiger-Hoek,” where he had
appointed some Hottentots to meet him, and went on the chase in their
company:—
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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