LARGE GAME OF CAPE COLONY. 283 



acquainted with the many species of antelopes 

 then abounding there, were sportsmen to the 

 manner born. Rather would it appear that two 

 hundred years of the chase, on the most glorious 

 hunting grounds ever provided by nature, have made 

 them the fine shots and ardent hunters they now 

 are. Certainly, if we may judge from the absurd 

 and anomalous nomenclature bestowed by these 

 early settlers on the game of South Africa, they 

 must have been the very cockneys of their period. 



For instance, the word eland signifies an elk, but 

 the difference between this, the largest of the 

 antelopes, with its stout straight horns, and the true 

 elk with its heavy branching antlers, could not well 

 be wider. Every antelope almost seems to have 

 been called a " bok," which, translated, literally 

 means a goat, and from this misnomer many absurd 

 mistakes have been made by the uninitiated. Thus, 

 Dr. Brookes, who appears to have gleaned most of 

 his information from Kolben, who visited the Cape 

 in 1705, in his Natural History, pubHshed in 1763, 

 gravely classes many of the South African antelopes 

 among the goats, as the blue goat (the koodoo, then 

 called the blaauwbok), spotted goat (bontebok), grey 

 goat (grysbok), diving goat (duykerbok), etc. 



The name gemsbok, literally translated, means 

 chamois goat, and is perhaps the worst specimen of 

 Boer misnomer. The gemsbok or oryx inhabits 

 waterless and open karroos, is about the size of an 

 ass, and has long straight sharp horns, more than 

 three feet in length ; while the chamois, not found in 

 Africa, lives in the mountains, is of no great size, 

 and has short horns turning over at the points. How 

 the early Dutch could have traced a similarity 



