ORDER RUMINANTIA. 155 



passage from one to the other leaves a doubt where that 

 limit should be fixed. Nature, however, shews the same 

 difficulty wherever the species allied have been studied in 

 sufficient numbers. Neither artificial nor natural charac- 

 ters enable us to mark the links of the chain, or rather 

 the knots in the web, by which every kind of animated 

 being is connected with others in a greater or less degree 

 of affinity. We shall find, in the following pages, the 

 ruminants subjected to the same laws which obtain in 

 other orders ; namely, to undergo a sort of cycle of all the 

 variations of subordinate characters consistent with their 

 typical plan; the last of a series resuming some of the dis- 

 tinctions of the first, and both possessing others which 

 connect them with the preceding or succeeding genera. 



The Caprine Tribe. 



Both the artificial and natural systems agree in placing 

 at the head of the family, those animals which retain the 

 forms of Deer, with the true attributes of their own section, 

 and, consequently, the genus Antilope precedes the others. 

 But before we enter upon our view of the subject, it may 

 be proper to make some preliminary reflections. By the 

 common consent of naturalists, the extensive tribe of Ca- 

 prine animals is composed of species extremely different in 

 shape and size, but linked together by a constant succession 

 and interchange of subordinate characters. A fanciful 

 theory might view the numerous species connected by this 

 sort of consanguinity, as resulting from several types origi- 

 nally endowed with the faculty of procreating, by their in- 

 termixture, subordinate prolific races, which in their turn 

 became the types of species and even of groups. Buffon 

 clothes a theory of this kind with the gaudy colours of his 

 brilliant imagination : two distinct species appear to him 

 as descended from a third ; one bearing the impress of the 

 male, the other of the female predominance of characters 



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