312 SPORTING ADVENTURES 



appendages is, however, that while they are hollow, like those 

 of the goat, the cow and other ruminants, they are deciduous 

 like those of the deer. This fact, which was acknowledged by 

 the scientific world only after receiving overwhelming evidence 

 of its truth, has given the animal a niche to itself, and it now 

 seems to be accepted as the connecting link between the 

 Ccrv'uJcB and the Capridcc another proof that Nature abhors a 

 vacuum. 



The male, when born, has protuberances where the horns 

 are to grow, and by the time he is six months old these are 

 developed into sharp-pointed little stumps capable of doing in- 

 jury in an assault. They grow about an inch the first year, and 

 are cast in January^ but all succeeding horns are cast a month 

 or two earlier, until the creature reaches maturity, when they 

 are cast after the rutting season. Thus we have the peculiar 

 and interesting fact of an animal that sheds and produces 

 perfect hollow horns in a few months, whereas, in all other 

 ruminants that have the same style of horns,, the growth is 

 slow and gradual, and takes some years to complete. Here 

 then we have the missing link between those animals that 

 have hollow and persistent horns, and those which have solid 

 and deciduous ones. In its dental formula it is also a link 

 between the two families mentioned, for it has no canine teeth, 

 btit it has eight incisors in the lower jaw, and boasts twenty- 

 four molars. In its glandular system and salacious disposition 

 it resembles the goat, but it differs from it in the fact that, 

 while the former is the most indiscriminate of feeders, the 

 most active of climbers, and a lover of rocks and mountains, 

 the latter is the most particular of creatures in its choice of 

 food, one of the least able to clamber amid crags and precipices, 

 and is at home only on the broad, treeless plains where all 

 objects are distinctly visible. It has the coat of the deer and 

 the eye and foot of the antelope, but it has the habits of 

 neither in any particular degree, so that it may say, like 

 Shakespeare's personage, 



" I hiivo no brother, 

 I am myself alone." 



The hair of the antelope also differs from that of nearly all 



