254 NATURE AND SPORT IN SOUTH AFRICA 



buffalo, or something very like it, was before you. 

 The eye is very ox-like. Turn to the barrel, back, 

 rump, and quarters, and the arched neck, and the 

 idea of a brown pony suggests itself. Glance at the 

 slender legs and neat shapely feet ; and the truest 

 points of the antelope family are there. Add to 

 these characteristics a bristling, upstanding whitish 

 mane, and long white swish tail, and the maddest 

 and most fantastic behaviour ever exhibited by any 

 animal, and you are still more bewildered. No 

 wonder that the earlier travellers and naturalists 

 were puzzled to know how to classify so unaccount- 

 able and so freakish a beast. 



Sparrmann, that accurate and steady-going Swede, 

 who travelled to the Cape in 1772, and was one of 

 the first to give a hint to the world of the glorious 

 fauna of the interior, rightly described this gnu as an 

 antelope. Barrow, who followed Sparrmann in 1796, 

 refers to it as described in the Sy sterna Nahirce 

 of Linnaeus as " a variety of the bos caffer, or buffalo, 

 under the diagnosis, elegans et parvus Africanus bos," 

 and he himself considered it as " partaking of the 

 horse, the ox, the stag, and the antelope," and adds, 

 rightly enough, that it was possessed of " strength, 

 swiftness, weapons of defence, a nice nose, and a 

 quick sight." 



The white-tailed gnu has now been long established 

 among the true antelopes, puzzling as are some of its 



