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Harris describes the favourite haunts of the Eland on the Vaal River in his 
days as follows :— 
“The Eland frequents the open prairies and low rocky hills interspersed with clumps 
of wood, but is never to be met with in a continuously wooded country. Rejoicing 
especially in low belts of shaded hillocks, and in the isolated groves of Acacia capensis 
which, like islands in the ocean, are scattered over many of the stony and gravelly plains 
of the interior, large herds of them are also to be seen grazing like droves of oxen on 
the more verdant meadows, through which some silver rivulet winds in rainbow 
brightness betwixt fringes of sighing bulrushes. Fat and lethargic groups may be seen 
scattered up and down the gentle acclivities, some grazing on the hill side, and others 
lazily basking in the morning sun-beam. Advancing they appear to move like a 
regiment of cavalry in single files, the goodliest bulls leading the van; whereas during a 
retreat these it is that uniformly brig up the rear. As the day dawned over the 
boundless meads of the Vaal River spread with a rich carpet of luxuriant herbage, and 
enamelled with pastures of brilliant flowers, vast droves of these lordly animals were 
constantly to be seen moving in solemn procession across the profile of the silent and 
treeless landscape, portions of which were often covered with long coarse grass, which 
when dry and waving its white hay-like stalks to the breeze, imparted to the plain the 
delusive and alluring appearance of ripe cornfields.” 
Since Harris issued his work in 1840 all the writers on the game- 
animals of Southern Africa have devoted more or less space to the Eland. 
Delagorgue, who published his travels in 1847, found this Antelope in plenty 
in Zululand. Methuen, in his ‘ Life in the Wilderness’ (1848), describes its 
habits in the Kalahari Desert, and Livingstone (1857) alludes to the Eland 
as being able to exist without water, and states that one may see hundreds 
of them in places thirty or forty miles distant from that element. The 
Hon. W. H. Drummond, in his ‘ Rough Notes on the Large Game of South 
Africa, has devoted a whole chapter to the pursuit of the Eland, which he 
met with on the Black and White Umvalosi Rivers, and in other districts, but 
not within the Colony itself, in which, according to Bryden, it became extinct 
between 1840 and 1850, having probably lingered longer in the waterless 
deserts of Bushman’s Land than in any other locality. 
Finally, Mr. H. A. Bryden, writing in 1897, in his ‘Nature and Sport in 
South Africa,’ on the rapidly disappearing forms of South-African game, 
laments the noblest of all the Antelopes. of the world as taking the lead 
in this sad progress. At the present time, he says, one must go far north 
into the parched and pathless recesses of the Upper Kalahari before the 
