58 
Cape by Capt. Gordon, and was the only survivor of twelve examples of this 
animal with which Captain Gordon had started for Europe. 
Upon Allamand’s ‘‘ Gazelle & bourse” Zimmermann, in the second volume 
of his ‘Geographische Geschichte,’ issued in 1780, established his Antilope 
marsupialis, adding a Latin diagnosis and a shortened translation of 
Allamand’s description. In the meantime, however, another name seems to 
have been proposed for the same animal by Forster, who, as we are informed 
by Zimmermann in the third volume of his ‘ Geographische Geschichte,’ had 
called the Springbuck Antilope euchore. ‘This no doubt was done in the 
famous ‘ Descriptiones Animalium,’ which, although generally accessible in 
manuscript to the naturalists of the day, and frequently quoted by them, was 
not published until 1844. However, as Forster’s name for the Springbuck 
has been accepted nearly universally by subsequent naturalists, we do not 
now propose to change the name by which this animal has been known for 
so many years. 
The immediately succeeding writers added little or nothing to our 
knowledge of this Antelope until about 1829, when Lichtenstein, in the 
second number of his ‘ Darstellung der Thiere,’ gave coloured figures of both 
its sexes under the name “ Antilope euchore, Forster,” from specimens in the 
Berlin Museum procured by him or his assistants in Cafferland. 
A few years later Cornwallis Harris visited South Africa. In his great 
work on the results of his journey subsequently published, this celebrated 
sportsman and naturalist devotes his third plate to the illustration of a group 
of Springbucks, which he describes at the period of his writing (1840) as 
then still abundant in the Colony and “distributed over the arid plains 
beyond it in unlimited herds.” ‘Amongst the many striking novelties,” 
Cornwallis Harris writes, “which present themselves to the eye of the 
traveller in Southern Africa there are, perhaps, few objects more conspicuous 
or more beautiful than the dancing herds of graceful Springbucks which 
speckle the broad plains of the interior.” 
“ Matchless in the symmetry of its form, the Springbok is measurelessly the most 
elegant and remarkable species of the comprehensive group to which it pertains. The 
dazzling contrast betwixt the lively cinnamon of its back and the snowy whiteness of the 
lower parts is agreeably heightened by the intensely rich chestnut bands which traverse 
the flanks—its dark beaming eye, with its innocent and lamb-like expression of face, 
and the showy folds of gossamer on the haunches—displayed or concealed at the animal’s * 
