THE BLUEBUCK OR BLAAUWBOK 



settlers, the Blaauwbok was probably already on 

 the road to extinction when it was first mentioned 

 by Kolben in his account of ' the present state of 

 the Cape of Good Hope,' translated into English 

 in 1731. The animal was then entirely confined 

 to the province of Swellendam, in the south-west 

 of Cape Colony a district, by the way, famous 

 as the last refuge of another curious antelope, the 

 handsome Bontebok, which happily still survives. 

 Thus, within the memory of the white man, the 

 Blaauwbok has always been, to quote the naturalist, 

 Le Vaillant, ' la plus rare et la plus belle des gazelles 

 d'Afrique.' The original cause of its limited range 

 and consequent rarity will probably never be 

 known ; for one may dismiss as highly improbable 

 the stories of the colonists who, according to Thun- 

 berg, ascribed the scarceness of the Blaauwbok to 

 the carelessness of the females, who were con- 

 tinually losing their young ones from the attacks 

 of wild beasts. In studying the distribution of 

 animals one often finds some apparently negligible 

 boundary, such as a river, completely isolating a 

 species from large tracts of country : thus, in the 

 old days, the Blue Wildebeest did not occur south 

 of the Vaal River, nor the Quagga to the north of 

 it : similarly to-day we find the White Rhinoceros 

 of the Ladak entirely confined to the west bank of 

 the Nile. Some such boundary may have limited 

 the range of the Blaauwbok : in any case this 

 antelope and its congener the Roan give one more 

 99 



