512 
NATURE 
[ULy 3, Tens 

easy prey to the Carnivora. But the wild fauna 
of the country was most difficult to detect by the 
eye; and other facts which have come to my 
notice have shown me that many of the great 
Herbivora actually escape notice by lions, 
leopards, chitas, hunting-dogs, and so forth, un- 
less the wind turns against them and their pre- 
sence is detected by a sense of smell. However, 
I do not wish to cross lances with Mr. Roosevelt, 
whose own theories in the main tally with the 
facts, but who always seems to me to get un- 
necessarily contentious about what he has in in- 
direct ways himself to admit—that there is a pur- 
pose, even if it be at times a paltry one, running 
Dik-dik 
Rhynchotraginae 
Klipspringers 
Oreotraginae 










Gazelles, etc. 
Antilopinae 
Oribi, etc. 
Neotraginae 
_Duikers 
Cephalophinae 
Bushbucks, etc. 
Tragelaphinae 
Waterbucks, etc. 
Kobinae 
Buffaloes and Oxen 
Hartebeests, ete, MP eee 
Bubalinae 



Sable, etc. 
Egocerinae 
Diagram of the family Bovidz showing relationships of the sub-families. 
From ‘‘ Life-Histories of African Game Animals.” 
through the coloration of all the living creatures 
of this planet. 
I, too, have my tic: and that is the classifica- 
tion, the phylogeny, of the Bovide. Probably it 
is Mr. Heller with whom I am about to fall out, 
and not Mr. Roosevelt. But one or other has 
introduced into the work under review theories 
and diagrams as to the descent and interrelation- 
ships of the antelopes and other bovids which 
are not only a perpetuation of nineteenth-century 
errors and misconceptions, but do not square with 
the facts of the comparative anatomy of the 
bovids, as set forth even as far back as the early 
‘eighties by the late Prof. A. H. Garrod; and in a 
very lucid and remarkable manner in our own day 
by Mr. R. I. Pocock, of the Zoological Society, 
NO. 2384, VOL. 95] 


as well as by the authorities of the British 
Museum (including the late Mr. Lydekker). Nor 
do they agree with what may be deduced from the 
most recent paleontological discoveries in Europe 
and North America. 
In Mr. Roosevelt’s book sufficient emphasis is 
not laid on the marked distinction existing between 
the tragelaphs and the antelopes. The mistakes 
in classification, which have travelled so far from 
Sclater and Thomas’s otherwise admirable book of 
antelopes, have infected the ideas of either Mr. 
Roosevelt or Mr. Heller. These ideas include 
an unnatural isolation of the hartebeests and 
gnus, a misconception of the position of the oryx 
sub-family, and of the relations in general 
between the true antelopes with annulated horns, 
the goats, sheep, and capricorns (likewise with 
annulated horns where they retain primitive 
features), the oxen (with a trace of annulation on 
the horns of the most primitive types of Congo 
buffalo and anoa), and the tragelaphs (eland, 
bongo, kudu, bushbuck, and nilghai) without 
annulations. 
This last sub-family has a few more primitive 
features in its skeleton and anatomy than the 
other divisions of the Bovide, though the 
ancestors of the oxen may have been not unlike 
the nilghai in appearance and anatomy, and in 
some way link the ancestral tragelaphs with the 
other groups. Notable among these “primitive” 
features are the ancient ungulate white spots and 
stripes, prevalent in some perissodactyls, in swine, 
tragelids, deer, tragelaphines, and Asiatic 
buffaloes; but absent from antelopes, sheep, 
and goats. Probably the most primitive of the 
existing tragelaphs is the four-horned antelope 
of India. Its existence there, and that of the 
nilghai, conveys an idea that the tragelaphines 
originated in Asia, spreading thence to South- 
eastern Europe and Africa, on the one hand, and 
even to North America on the other. Amongst 
the true antelopes themselves, the duykers and 
neotragines are obviously the most primitive of 
existing forms, and apparently first developed 
from the basal stock of the bovids in France or 
Southern Europe. From them arose the gazelles, 
or gazelle-like forms, which have “proliferated” 
in course of time into pallas, topis (Damaliscus), 
hartebeests, and  gnus. The pallas have 
specialised in some points, such as reduction of 
the mamme, but they are very suggestive in 
others of the vanished link between gazelles 
and hartebeests. The neotragines, possibly, 
were ancestral to the Cobus group; and the 
primitive Cobine stock seems to have given 
birth to the remarkable orygine sub-family (addax, « 
hippotragus, and oryx). 
Mr. Roosevelt’s book throws a good deal of 
light on the problem of the origin and descent of 
the Bovide, even though his or Mr. Heller’s 
theories are not in all points acceptable—at any 
rate to this reviewer of his book. 
The book is most effectively illustrated by 
photographs, drawings, maps, and diagrams. 
H. H. Jounston. 



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