CHAP. II HARTEBEESTS 25 



red in colour, derive protection from their enemies 

 owing to their resemblance not only in colour but 

 also in shape to ant-heaps, and that giraffes gain an 

 advantage in the struggle for life owing to the fact 

 that their long necks look like tree-trunks and their 

 heads and horns like broken branches. 



Well, hartebeests are red in colour wherever 

 they are found all over Africa. Ant-heaps are only 

 red when they are built of red soil. In parts of the 

 Bechwanaland Protectorate, where the Cape harte- 

 beest used to be common, the ant-heaps are a glaring 

 white. In East Africa, in different portions of 

 which territory hartebeests of three species are very 

 numerous, all of which are bright red in colour, red 

 ant-heaps are certainly not a conspicuous feature in 

 all parts of the country, and there were, if my memory 

 serves me, very few ant-heaps of any size on the 

 plains where I met with either Coke's, Neumann's, 

 or Jackson's hartebeests.^ But even in those districts 

 w^here the ant-heaps are red in colour, and neither 

 very much larger nor smaller than hartebeests, they 

 are usually of one even rounded shape, and it would 

 only be here and there, where two had been thrown 

 up together forming a double - humped structure, 

 that anything resembling one of these animals could 

 be seen. Such unusual natural objects must be 

 anything but common, and cannot, I believe, have 

 had any effect in determining the bodily shape of 

 hartebeests, though, if the coloration of animals is 

 influenced by their environment, red soil and red 

 ant-heaps may have had their influence on the colour 

 of the ancestral form from which all the various 

 but nearly allied species of hartebeests have been 

 derived. 



I was once hunting in 1885 with a Boer friend 



^ The plains along the railway line between Simba and Nairobi, the open 

 country between Lakes Nakuru and Elmenteita, or the neighbourhood of the 

 road between Landiani and Ravine Station. 



