OF THE HOLLOW-HORNED RUMINANTS. 45 



failures. Of this nature is the diagnosis proposed by M. Geoffroy St. Hilaire', viz. 

 that the Antelopes have the core of the horn sohd, and without either pores or cancelli ; 

 and that which M. Agassiz broached at a meeting of the Zoological Society in 1 833, to 

 the effect that these animals are distinguished from the genera Bos, Ovis, and Capra, by 

 having the spiral twist of the horns turning from left to right, instead of the opposite di- 

 rection. Both these ideas are founded upon hasty generalizations, inapplicable to at 

 least three-fourths of the genus ; the core of the horn is as completely cancellated in all 

 the larger species of Antelopes as in the Ox or Sheep ; and the spiral curvature, besides 

 being confined to a verj^ small number of species, is in some instances turned in an op- 

 posite direction to what M. Agassiz supposes, as, for example, in the Buhalus and Caama. 

 Even were they influential or important enough to be considered as natural characters, 

 such attributes are not, therefore, sufficiently general to admit of being employed in the 

 subordinate station of mere practical diagnoses ; and the same may be said of every 

 other character hitherto employed to distinguish the genus Antilope, as a peculiar, 

 positive, and integral group. 



It is obvious, in fact, that the form, direction, and superficies of the horns, the prin- 

 cipal characters hitherto employed not only in defining this but all the other genera of 

 hollow-horned Ruminants, can have no assignable influence over the habits and economy 

 of the animals, nor any conceivable relation to their structural modifications : they do 

 not even possess the solitary merit of artificial characters in general, that namely of 

 being exclusively appropriate to their respective groups ; and more than one instance 

 might be adduced where even the most skilful zoologists have been misled by their ap- 

 plication to associate particular species with genera to which they have no natural 

 affinity. I may cite as examples the Rocky Mountain Goat, which De Blainville, Des- 

 marest, Hamilton Smith, and even, as it appears. Baron Cuvier' himself, consider as an 

 Antelope, for no better reason than because it has not the " cornua sursum versa, erecta, 

 corapressa, scabra" of the Ihex, — a character which, by the way, might be made to ex- 

 clude from their natural congeners half the domestic varieties of the common Goat 

 itself; — and the Anoa, in reality a small Buffalo, but called an ^n<e/o/?e because it hap- 

 pens to have straight erect horns, a character equally conspicuous in many varieties of 

 the Zehu (Bos Indicus). On the other hand, the horns of the Gnoos have preciselv the 

 same form and direction as those of the Linnrean genus Bos ; they are " anirorsum versa, 

 lunata, lavia," in the fullest acceptation of the terms ; yet these animals have never been 

 associated with the Oxen, notwithstanding the identity of their quasi-generic characters. 



The insufficiency of these principles, and the arbitrary and unphilosophical classifica- 

 tion to which they led, were strongly felt by ray late learned and estimable friend M. 

 F. Cuvier, the most profound and scientific mammalogist of modern times. In his 

 article on the Chickara, alluding to his imperfect knowledge of its characters, he ob- 



' Cuv. ' Rhgne Animal,' i. 266. « Ibid., i. 272 (Note 1.). 



