“At all the places in India, where we have settlements, they are rarities, brought from the distant interior parts of the country, as presents to Nabobs and great men. Lord Clive, General Carnac, Mr. Walsh, Mr. Watts, and many other gentlemen, who have seen much of India, tell me they never saw them wild. So far as I have yet found, Bernier is the only author who has ever mentioned them. “In the fourth vol. of his Mémoires, he gives an account of a journey which he undertook, ann. 1664, from Delhi, to the province of Cachemire, with the Mogul Aurengzeb, who went to that terrestrial paradise, as it is esteemed by the Indians, to avoid the heat of the summer. In giving an account of the hunting, which was the Emperor’s amusement in this journey, he describes, among others, that of _le Nyl-ghau_, but without saying more of the animal than that the Emperor sometimes kills them in such numbers as to distribute quarters of them to all his Omrachs; which shows that they were there wild, and in plenty, and esteemed good or delicious food. “This agrees with the rarity of these animals at Bengal, Madras, and Bombay; for Cachemire is the most northern province of the Empire, and it was on the march from Delhi to that place that Bernier saw the Emperor hunt them.” Although, as we have already seen, living specimens of the Nilgai were long ago brought to Europe, little addition was made to our knowledge of this animal in its native state until the days of Elliot, Jerdon, and Hodgson. In 1839 Sir Walter Elliot included the Nilgai in his catalogue of the Mammals of the Southern Mahratta country, where he states “it is found in the thick low jungles.” Jerdon, in his volume on the Mammals of India, tells us that the Nilgai “frequents thin forests and low jungles, but is also often found in tolerably open plains with only a few scattered bushes. It associates in small herds, varying from 7 or 8 to 20 and upwards.” Mr. Robert A. Sterndale, whose popular manual on the Mammals of India and Ceylon was published in 1884, does not speak favourably of his experience of the flesh of the Nilgai as an article of diet:—“The Nilgao,” he says, “feeds on Beyr (_Zizyphus jujuba_) and other trees, and at times devours such quantities of the intensely acrid berries of the Aoula (_Phyllanthus emblica_) that its flesh becomes saturated with the bitter elements of the fruit. This is most noticeable in soup, less so in a steak, which is at times not bad. The tongue and marrow-bones, however, are generally as much as the sportsman claims, and in the Central Provinces at least the natives are grateful for all the rest.” Col. Kinloch, who writes of the Nilgai mainly from a sporting point of view, gives us the following account of this animal:—