The Bontebok 



79 



flats as far back as 1835, when they still swarmed with game, that the 

 animals from which they received their name were not bonteboks but 

 blesboks. 



One reason why I consider it is impossible that the bontebok and 

 the blesbok could ever have co-existed in the same district is because the 

 two species are so very closely allied that they would inevitably have 

 interbred and become fused into one species more or less intermediate 

 between the two very closely allied forms. There is not more difference 

 between the bontebok and the blesbok than there is between the stripeless 

 eland of South-Western Africa and the richly coloured striped form of the 

 same species found all over South-East Africa, whilst the difference 

 between the two former animals is less than that between the variegated 

 form of bushbuck found on the Chobi River and the dark race of the same 

 species of antelope inhabiting the coast region of the Cape Colony. Only, 

 in the case of the elands and the bushbucks, the extreme forms are con- 

 nected by an innumerable series of links which can only be looked upon 

 as local variations from the type species. If all the varieties of the 

 bushbuck which exist in South-East Africa, and connect step by step 

 the dark brown and almost spotless form found in the Cape Colony 

 with the richly variegated race met with on the banks of the Chobi, had 

 been exterminated before the advent of Europeans in South Africa, leaving 

 only the two widely different forms, there can be no doubt, I think, that 

 the bushbuck of the Chobi and the bushbuck of the Cape Colony would 

 have been considered to be two distinct species of antelopes. In the case 

 of the blesbok and the bontebok, the connecting links or intermediate 

 forms have been lost. It is not improbable, I think, that the blesbok ages 

 ago once ranged right through the Cape Colony down to the shores of the 

 sea at Cape Agulhas, but that the gradual dessication of the karroo in the 

 south-western portions of the Cape Colony— of which there is a good deal 

 of evidence — or several years of continuous drought, caused the withdrawal 



