SHEEP, GOATS, AND ANTELOPES. 81 



which have reverted to a nearly wild state. True wild 

 oxen now exist only in India and the adjacent regions, 

 while wild buffalo occur both in India and Africa. 



Equally characteristic of the Old World are wild sheep 

 and goats, the " big-horn " being an outlying North 

 American type. Both groups are essentially mountain 

 animals, the head-quarters of the former being the high- 

 lands of Central Asia, while on the southern flanks of the 

 same mountain-barrier the latter are more abundant. 

 Both are also represented in the mountains of Europe ; but 

 in peninsular India there is but the wild goat of the 

 Nilgiries, while in the whole of Africa we have only the 

 wild sheep of Barbary and the ibex of Abyssinia. This 

 absence of sheep and goats from Africa may, perhaps, be 

 due to the fact that these animals are of comparatively late 

 origin, and were probably poorly represented at the time 

 when the other ruminants entered that continent from the 

 north. The musk-ox of Arctic America is an aberrant 

 form allied to the sheep. 



The antelopes have a distribution nearly the reverse of 

 that of the sheep and goats, the great majority being 

 restricted to Africa, where there are probably fully ninety 

 species, against about a score in all the rest of the world, 

 except Arabia and Syria, of which the fauna is allied to 

 that of Africa. Indeed, the only typical antelopes found 

 beyond these regions are the black-buck, the nilgai, the 

 four-horned antelope of India, the saiga of Tartary, the 

 chiru of Tibet, and several members of the widely dis- 

 tributed gazelles. The rings marking the horns of the 

 latter (Fig. 28) and many other antelopes are very distinc- 

 tive of the group, although by no means universal. The 

 European chamois, the goat-antelopes of India and China, 

 and the Eocky Mountain goat of America, serve to connect 

 the typical antelopes with the goats, and it is these alone 

 which represent the group in Europe, to the eastward of 

 India, and in North America. Seeing that in Tertiary 

 times, antelopes of African types occurred in southern 

 Europe and India, it is difficult to determine why the 

 group should have so dwindled or disappeared there ; 

 although we can readily account for their extraordinary 



