170 Animal Life 
further point in which they differ in development from the cervicaprines is that in 
three species of Hippotragine the females bear horns. The horns, which tend to 
be very long, do not exhibit in any existing form any tendency to a Cervicaprine 
recuryature at the tips. ike the Cervicaprines, the Oryxes have retained their 
accessory hoofs, four teats, and a long tail, while they have entirely lost the anteorbital 
glands. 
The most remarkable form of this group—very cervicaprine in appearance—is the 
now extinct Bluebuck (Hippotragus leucopheus). This 
animal was formerly an inhabitant of Cape Colony, but 
was successfully exterminated by the Dutch settlers without 
any aid from British sportsmen at the end of the 18th or 
beginning of the 19th century. Its coloration was mainly a 
bluish-grey tending to brown on the upper parts of the 
body, with a chestnut frontlet that extended some distance 
down the nose and round the eyes. The horns rose 
vertically from above the orbits, and then sloped backwards 
and resembled those of the roan antelope. There is a good 
deal about the build of the bluebuck and the shape of its 
horn-cores to suggest affinity with the extinct antelope 
Tragoceras, the fossil remains of which are found in Greece 
and Asia Minor, and which may have been somewhere near 
the common stock of the Cervicaprines and Oryxes. The 
Roan antelope is a splendid beast, with a horse-like mane 
on the mdge of the neck and a cobus-like mane along the 
throat. Its face is boldly marked in black and white, and 
the rest of the body in reddish-grey or chestnut-brown and 
white. The ears are very long and curved downwards at 
the tips, which are black. In a West African form of the 
Roan antelope, as also in one oryx, the ears grow to 
extravagant lengths, and are shaped like the segment of 
an orange. The Roan antelope is the most widely dis- 
tributed of all the hippotragine group, being found in 
several sub-species in South, Central, West and Hast Africa, 
extending, in fact, from the southern borders of the Sahara 
Desert to (formerly) the vicinity of Cape Colony. The 
Sable antelope has a more restricted range, extending south- 
wards from the vicinity of Kilimanjaro in Hast Africa (on 
the north) through German and Portuguese Hast Africa, 
and British Central Africa across the Zambezi to the 
= yee Transvaal and Zululand. It is found also in the Barotse 
hotographs by 3 i 
W.P.Dando. kingdom. The horns of this antelope have a noble sweep. 
HORNS OF They are rather broad laterally at their bases and perform a 
SEER CEC crescent-like, convex curve backwards to their very sharp tips. 
The horns of the female are less broad at the base, much 
less curved and more oryx-like in appearance. ‘The sable 
antelope as a calf is born a yellowish-brown with a small black fringe to its tail, 
and somewhat vaguely defined ‘white cheeks and lips. If it is a female the white 
markings over the eyes and the black streak right down the nose and again right 
over the eyes along the side of the cheeks will become intensified, as will also the 
white belly and rump; but the rest of the hide may (as in Nyasaland) remain a 
golden-brown, tending in some old examples towards sepia and even black. But the 
