154 



KNOWLEDGE. 



[August 1, 1892. 



north. The musk ox of Arctic America is an aberrant 

 form allied to the sheep. 



The antelopes have a distribution nearl}' the reverse of 

 that of the sheep and goats, the great majorit_y 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 



disappeared from other regions ; and there is no better 

 instance of this survival than the giraffe, a ruminant that, 

 as regards its cranial appendages, stands midway between 

 the hollow-horned group and the deer. We are all 

 familiar with the ungainly and yet beautiful form of the 

 girafl'e ; but it is probably less well known that giraffes 

 once roamed over Greece, Persia, India, and China, where, 







'■fS^^^^^m^^^- 



FiG. .■?.— Tlie Whitp Cattle of Chillingham Park, H'oi-Himnberland. (From Jardinc.) 



that of Africa. Indeed, the only typical antelopes found 

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

 foui'-horoed 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. 4) and many other antelopes are very distinctive 

 of the group, although by no means 

 universal. The European chamois, 

 the goat-antelopes of India and China, 

 and the Rocky ]\Iountain 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 w'hy 

 the group should have so dwindled or 

 disappeared there ; although we can 

 readily account for their extraordinary 

 development when they once obtained 

 an entry into Africa, on account of 

 the immense area open to them, in 

 which there was no competition by 

 any other ruminants except buffaloes 

 and giraffes. 



To the zoologist, Africa is indeed a 

 country characterized by the number 

 of animals living there which have 



Pig. 4. — Horns of 

 Gazelle. (From 

 Griiiitlier.) 



as in Africa at the present day, they were accompanied by 

 ostriches and hippopotami. And here again we are con- 

 fronted by the problem how to account for the disappear- 

 ance from regions apparently exactly suited to their habits, 

 of all these animals. The giraffe is, however, not only 

 the sole survivor of several extinct species of its owni kind. 



Fig. 5. — Skull of Sivathere, from the Pliocene of India. 



but it likewise represents a lost group of Old World 

 ruminants, intermediate between the horned and antlered 

 types. The head-quarters of this group was India, where, 



