ay 
We come now to one of the largest and finest of the whole long series of 
African Antelopes. In Mr. John Millais’s well-known ‘ Breath from the 
Veldt,’ drawings of the heads of the Sable Antelope and the Kudu occupy a 
conspicuous position on the cover. Mr. Millais, than whom there can be no 
- better judge, although he rather gives the palm to the Sable, admits that the 
Kudu surpasses its rival “in elegance and general appearance ’’ when dead, 
but gives the Sable preference when seen alive on the veldt. It is really 
a difficult question, he allows, to decide between the “‘ two rival beauties.” 
But we will proceed to the history of the Kudu. 
Although the Kudu was certainly known to Kolben and other visitors to the 
Cape in early days, Buffon was the first writer to give us a good account 
of it. In the twelfth volume of his ‘ Histoire Naturelle, publisbed in 1764, 
Buffon introduced it into his work under the title of ‘‘ Le Condoma,” and 
gave a figure of its unmistakable horns from a pair in the possession of the 
Marquis de Marigny. In these horns Buffon recognized the animal previously 
indicated by Kolben as a “‘ kind of large Wild Goat.” In the sixth volume o¢ 
the Supplement to the ‘ Histoire Naturelle,’ published in 1782, Buffon entered 
into fuller particulars of the Kudu, which he now called the “ Condoma ou 
Coésdoés,” apparently recognizing that the first of these names had been based 
on a mistake or misspelling. He was also now able to give a figure of the 
whole animal from a well-preserved skin received from ‘the interior of 
Africa.” Further information was added, taken from the Dutch edition 
of the ‘ Histoire Naturelle,’ which had been then recently published by 
Schneider in Amsterdam, and to which Prof. Allamand had contributed a 
description of this animal, based on a specimen living in 1776 in the Menagerie 
of the Prince of Orange, to whom it had been sent by Joachim van Plattenberg, 
then Dutch Governor of the Cape. In his first essay on the genus Antilope, 
published in 1766, the great naturalist, Pallas, placed the Kudu sixteenth in 
his list, basing it mainly on the ‘“ Condoma ” of Buffon, and proposed for it 
the specific name “ strepsiceros.” Although, therefore, the Kudu could not 
have been the Strepsiceros of classical authors (which was in all probability 
the Addax), there can be no question that the Antilope strepsiceros of Pallas, 
as based on Buffon’s “‘ Condoma,”’ is this species. 
In 1827, Hamilton Smith, writing on the Mammals in Griffith’s ‘ Animal 
Kingdom,’ used the term Strepsiceros as one of the subgeneric divisions of 
his genus Damalis, thus, according to the views of modern systematists, 
