CHAPTER XII 

 ROAN, SABLE, AND ORYX 



Introduction to Family Bovidce 



The Bovidce comprise the oxen, sheep, goats, antelopes, 

 and their allies. There is, unfortunately, no general term 

 in English for the group. The popular term of antelope, 

 which comprises nearly all of the species here considered, 

 has, furthermore, no zoological significance, but is merely a 

 term under which have been banded together the genera 

 not closely related to those which have given rise to the 

 domesticated races of oxen, sheep, and goats. The various 

 so-called " antelopes " differ from one another more widely 

 than some of them do from oxen and than others do 

 from goats. The roan, the hartebeest, and the eland, for 

 example, all differ from one another and from the water- 

 bucks or gazelles as much as from the buffaloes. Some an- 

 telopes are more divergent from the more generalized forms 

 than are the oxen. The family may be defined as two-toed, 

 ruminant, hoofed mammals bearing, in the male sex at least, 

 frontal appendages in the form of horns supported by bony 

 cores arising from the frontal bones, and having the false 

 hoofs rudimentary or without any bony attachment or else 

 absent. They differ from the deer or Cervidce chiefly by 

 the character of the horns, which are hollow and chitinous 

 in structure and of dermal derivation, the bony core alone 

 being homologous to the horns of deer. 



321 



