LARGE GAME OF CAPE COLONY. 295 



the least of it, that this fact has not (as I believe) 

 been noted and set right by naturalists. It may be 

 added that the blue wildebeest, admittedly rare 

 even in Gordon Cumming's time, south of the 

 Orange River, has, for many years, been extinct in 

 those regions. 



Gordon Cumming found the brindled gnu in the 

 territories now known as Griqualand West, the 

 Orange Free State, and Transvaal. The last-named 

 state was, undoubtedly, its chiefest and most 

 favourite habitat; but there the Boers have, of 

 late years, played sad havoc with this singular 

 antelope, not so long ago found in countless 

 numbers. 



The Bontebok (Alcelaphus pygargus). It is 

 difficult to understand why this antelope, described 

 by old writers as being almost as plentiful as the 

 springbok, should have been one of the earliest to 

 disappear. One of its last resorts were the Bontebok 

 Flats, to the north of the present Queenstown 

 district. Mr. J. B. Evans, late of Riet Fontein, 

 on whose farms I formerly shot in the Colony, 

 told me that in 1851 he knew of seventeen or 

 eighteen being in that locality. At the present 

 day there are a few preserved on private farms in 

 Bredasdorp, Swellendam, near Cape Agulhas, where 

 they have been ever since 1830. Barrow speaks of 

 them as abounding in his day (1796) near the Zee 

 Koe River, between the present town of Hanover and 

 the Orange River, and he further mentions that they 

 had been as plentiful in Swellendam as springboks 

 in the Sneeuwberg district, but were then only seen 

 there in troops of ten or twelve. 



The Blessbok (Alcelaphus albifrons) is now extinct 



