CH. II] ANTELOI'E 47 



part of the herd will stand drowsily erect and the rest 

 lie down. 



Near Kitanga there were three wildebeest which were 

 usually found with a big herd of hartebeest, and which 

 rcguhu'ly every afternoon lay down for some hours, just 

 as their friends did. The animal has a very bovine 

 look, and though called an antelope it is quite as close 

 kin to the oxen as it is to many of the other beasts 

 also called antelope. The fact is that antelope is not 

 an exact term at all, but merely means any hollow- 

 horned ruminant which the obser\'er happens to think is 

 not a sheep, goat, or ox. When, with LiniiiEUS, the 

 first serious effort at the systematization of living nature 

 began, men naturally groped in the effort to see correctly 

 I and to express what they saw. When they came to 

 ' describe the hollow-horned ruminants, they, of course, 

 already had names at hand for anything that looked like 

 one of the domestic creatures with which they were 

 familiar ; and as " antelope " was also already a name of 

 general, though vague, currency for some wild creatures, 

 they called everything an antelope that did not seem to 

 come in one of the more familiar domestic categories. 

 Study has shown that sheep and goats grade into one 

 another among the wild species ; and the so-called 

 antelopes include forms differing from one another quite 

 as sharply as any of them differ from their kinsfolk that 

 are represented in the farmyard. 



Zebras share with hartebeest the distinction of being 

 the most abundant game animal on the plains, through- 

 out the whole Athi region. The two creatures are fond 

 of associating together, usually in mixed herds, but 

 sometimes there will merely be one or two indi^ iduals 

 of one species in a big herd of the other. They are 

 sometimes, though less frequently than the hartebeest. 



