38 AFRICAN NATURE NOTES CHAP. 



though of a paler shade than any other part of the 

 body. In the blesbok, too, the white face " blaze " is 

 not continuous from the horns downwards as in the 

 bontebok, but is interrupted above the eyes by a 

 bar of brown. The legs, too, in the blesbok are 

 not so white as in the bontebok, and whilst the 

 horns of the latter species are always perfectly 

 black, in the former they are of a greenish colour. 



In a word, the differences between the bontebok 

 and the blesbok are confined to the intensity of 

 the colours on various portions of their hides, the 

 former being much more brilliantly coloured than 

 the latter. 



Owing to the fact that the early Dutch settlers 

 at the Cape first met with the antelopes which they 

 called bonteboks on the plains near Cape Agulhas, 

 and subsequently at first gave the same name to 

 the nearly allied species which was discovered 

 about one hundred years later in the neighbourhood 

 of the Orange river, although these latter were un- 

 doubtedly blesboks and not bonteboks, a great con- 

 fusion arose between these two nearly allied species, 

 which I think that I was the first to clear up, in 

 the article on the bontebok which I contributed to 

 the Great and Sma/l Game of Africa, published by 

 Rowland Ward, Limited, in 1899. I cannot go into 

 all the arguments I then used, but there can be 

 no doubt that the animals which Captain (after- 

 wards Sir Cornwallis) Harris first met with on the 

 bontebok flats near the Orange river, in the 

 Colesburg division of the Cape Colony, were 

 blesboks and not bonteboks, and that all the 

 millions of antelopes of the same species which he 

 subsequently saw to the north of the Orange river 

 and thought to be bonteboks were also all blesboks, 

 and that he never saw a bontebok at all until after 

 his return to the Cape, when he made a special 

 journey to Cape Agulhas to secure specimens of 



