344 CLASS MAMMALIA. 



them to be regarded as more nearly allied to Bos than to 

 Capra. Where the Persian, Arabo Indee, and Eastern and 

 Western Arabic, are concerned, it appears (whenever 

 the names are obtained from well-informed natives under 

 circumstances in which neither the inquirer nor the native 

 can mistake the precise object of the question,) that all the 

 species we are about to enumerate will be designated with 

 the generical word jS Ghau, ox or cow ; Sj Bakr, oxen, 

 cows, in the Arabic; or s-5£j Bakrah, in the Persian. The 

 Oryges, moreover, are almost as universally distinguished by 

 a term which refers them to the Goat, (for the exceptions 

 of the Bahrein Cow, or White Oryx, occurs in a country 

 where the animal is a stranger,) the generical \Xj Bukra, 

 being affixed to them ; hence we may suspect that the 

 similarity of sound among unlettered people, are the causes 

 of the few mistakes which occur in these two genera, and 

 in Ovis ; mso and rro Barah, and its mutilations Baa, 

 Bery, &c. Shaw, we have no doubt, was misled when he 

 assigned the repeated name of Beker-el Wash, to a stag, 

 whose true Arabic name must be b^K Ajal, as it is also in 

 the Hebrew. How Aristotle, and his successors, first came 

 to designate an African animal of the present genus by the 

 name of BoyjSaXos-, cannot be explained but by the suppo- 

 sition that he gave that name (which it is worth observing 

 is symphonic with that of the Buffalo, in all the dialects of 

 Northern and Central Asia,) in consequence of some imper- 

 fect information which he may have possessed upon this sub- 

 ject through the Macedonian invaders of Eastern Persia. 

 But we shall return to this question in the article Buffalo. 

 On turning the inquiry towards South Africa, where the in- 

 digenous tribes are scarcely removed from savage life, it 

 nevertheless appears that none view these large species as in 

 the least allied with Antilope; they consider them as large 

 game of the desert or forest unconnected with other genera, 

 or connect them with large ruminants, such as Impoofwith 



