85 
The great traveller and naturalist, Peter Simon Pallas, whose name we 
have already often mentioned in the course of this work, was the first 
technical describer of this Antelope, although he was by no means its 
discoverer, for he himself quotes previous references to it in the works of 
older authors. But Pallas, in the Supplement to his memoir on the Antelopes, 
published 1777, gave us the first scientific description of it, and selected for 
it the appropriate scientific name guttwrosa, by which it has been ever since 
known. According to Pallas, the first Europeans to become acquainted with 
this Gazelle were the Jesuit missionaries in China, one of whom, Pereira, as 
quoted by Witsenius, mentions it as a Chinese animal; while Du Halde, in 
his great work upon China, describes it, under the name “ Hoang-yang” or 
Capra flava, as wandering about in large flocks in the deserts of Mongolia. 
Further accounts of this Antelope were subsequently given by Messerschmidt 
and Gmelin in the Commentaries of the St. Petersburg Academy. These 
are also quoted by Pallas, who himself met with this animal on the upper 
course of the River Onon, on the southern frontiers of Transbaikalia. Pallas 
concludes his history of this species with a lengthened description of its 
external form and anatomy, and gives an uncoloured figure, in which the 
peculiar swollen condition of the throat in the male in the breeding-season 
(whence it was termed gutturosa) is correctly shown. 
Pallas’s posthumous work, ‘Zoographia Rosso-Asiatica,’ contains little 
more than a summary of his previous account of this animal. 
The numerous authors who followed Pallas added little or nothing to 
our knowledge of the Mongolian Gazelle, and were content to base their 
notices of it almost entirely upon his publications. It is not, in fact, 
until we come to nearly modern days that we obtain any further original 
information concerning this animal. 
Dr. Gustav Radde, now Director of the Museum at Tiflis, made extensive 
journeys in South-eastern Siberia, under the patronage of the Imperial 
Geographical Society of Russia, in 1855 and the three following years, and 
amassed large zoological collections. One of the volumes of his ‘ Reisen im 
Suiden von Ost-Sibirien,’ published at St. Petersburg in 1862, is devoted to 
an account of the Mammals of South-eastern Siberia, and is, and will long 
remain, our standard work on this subject. Dr. Radde brought home five 
good specimens of this Antelope, and commences his account of it with 
accurate descriptions of its summer and winter pelages. He adds a detailed 
