ON AN EAST AFRICAN RANCH 57 



with the wildebeest herds. The stomachs of those I opened 

 contained nothing but grass; they are grazers, not browsers. 

 The hartebeest are much faster, and if really frightened 

 speedily leave their clumsy-looking friends behind; but 

 the wildebeest, as I have seen them, are by far the most 

 wary. The wildebeest and zebra seemed to me to lie down 

 less freely than the hartebeest; but I frequently came on 

 herds of both lying down during the heat of the day. Some- 

 times 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 regularly 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 observer happens to think is not a 

 sheep, goat, or ox. When, with Linnaeus, the first serious 

 effort at the systematization of living nature began, men 

 naturally groped in the effort to see correctly and to ex- 

 press 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 every- 

 thing 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 farm-yard. 



Zebra share with hartebeest the distinction of being 

 the most abundant game animal on the plains, throughout 

 the whole Athi region. The two creatures are fond of as- 

 sociating together, usually in mixed herds; but some- 



