“The flesh of a cow Nilgai is occasionally excellent, and the tongue and marrow-bones are supposed to be delicacies. They are, however, hardly worth shooting, except when one is in want of meat for Mahomedan servants: Hindoos, of course, will not touch the flesh.” [Illustration: Fig. 99. Frontlet of an adult male Nilgai. (Brit. Mus.). ] The Nilgai does well in captivity, and, as we have already mentioned, several of the original descriptions of this animal by the older writers were based on specimens brought alive to Europe. In 1824 both sexes of the Nilgai were well figured by Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and F. Cuvier in their ‘Histoire Naturelle des Mammifères,’ from specimens living in the Jardin des Plantes. In 1845, as we learn from Gray, the Nilgai bred in the Knowsley Menagerie, and there was at that time a herd of a male and four females kept in one of the paddocks along with the Elands. In 1847 the half-grown male and young were drawn from some of these specimens by Waterhouse Hawkins, and the figures were published in the twenty-ninth plate of the ‘Gleanings.’ The Nilgai has been an inhabitant of the Zoological Society’s Menagerie from its commencement. In 1830 it was described and figured in the first of the two volumes on the ‘Gardens and Menagerie of the Zoological Society’ by Vigors and Bennett, and in February 1831, as recorded in the ‘Proceedings,’ a specimen of a young one, born at the Society’s farm at Kingston, was exhibited and described at one of the Scientific Meetings. This appears to have been the first instance of its breeding in the Society’s Gardens, but since that date many other examples have been received, and the species has frequently bred in the Menagerie. On referring to the Society’s registers we find that this has taken place in 1856, 1864, 1866, 1868, and 1869. As a general rule, two young ones are produced at the same birth; but the young animals, although they thrive well, are excessively shy and timid, as is also the case with many others of the Deer and Antelopes, so that, if frightened, they frequently injure themselves by rushing against the fences of their paddocks. Our coloured illustration of the Nilgai (Plate LXXXVII.) has been prepared from specimens of both sexes of this animal now living in the Zoological Society’s Gardens, where they were received in exchange on October 14th, 1896.