87 
of his journeyings, the fact being that he had only just entered within the 
southern boundary of the range of this species. Burchell’s typical specimen, 
or rather portions of it, viz. the frontlet and horns, is still in the National 
Collection, to which he presented it. 
Between the period of the discovery of the Sassaby by Burchell and the 
publication of its description this Antelope attracted the attention of another 
observer, Samuel Daniell, an artist who accompanied Dr. Somerville on two 
expeditions into the interior of the Cape Colony early in the present century. 
One of the copper-plates engraved by William Daniell from the drawings 
made by his deceased brother Samuel, and published in 1820, gives a good 
representation of this species, which is stated in the accompanying letterpress 
to be “an Antelope, heretofore not described, found in the Booshwana 
country.” But no further particulars are given of it. 
Hamilton-Smith, in his volume on the Ruminants, published in Griffith’s 
Translation of Cuvier’s ‘ Régne Animal,’ correctly brought together Daniell’s 
“ Sassaby”” and Burchell’s Antilope lunata under one head and added a copy 
of Daniell’s figure. 
Except in the quotations of its names by various systematists we find 
little more recorded of the Sassaby until 1840, when Capt. W. Cornwallis 
Harris gave an excellent account of it in his beautiful work on the ‘Game 
and Wild Animals of Southern Africa.’ This experienced sportsman and 
artist devoted one of his life-like plates to the representation of this Antelope, 
with which he had made himself well acquainted. ‘The Sassaybe,” he tells 
us, “like its congener, the Hartebeest, delights in the neighbourhood of 
hills, frequenting the open country with island-looking mimosa-groves, as 
well as the patches of scraggy forest that skirt the foot of many of the 
superior mountain ranges, which, however, neither species ever ascends. 
Among the parks of mokaala trees about the Cashan and Kurichane 
mountains we constantly saw them.” The painted skins of the Sassaby 
were in those days, Harris tells us, ‘‘in great request amongst the savages for 
kobos or leathern mantles, as well on account of their brilliant colours as 
from their extreme suppleness.” In this article of dress, Harris tells us, 
“ the shining black tail, opened and squeezed flat, was usually fastened on so 
as to depend like a queue from the back of the neck, and the universal 
admiration in which this elegant appendage was held rendered its wearer 
the subject of many a quarrel,” 
