THE HARTEBEESTS 
LTHOUGH differing very considerably in outward appearance 
from wildebeests, the hartebeests show certain affinities 
/ m to t ^ lose animals, and have therefore been included with 
/ % them in the great family of the Bubalidince. Putting 
/ aside Lichtenstein’s hartebeest ( Bubalis lichtensteini ), 
iLj which is not nearly related to any other member of the 
group, all the other species can be divided into two classes, broadly 
speaking — those in which the horns are more or less widespread, and 
those in which they first grow straight or nearly straight up from the 
head and then turn sharply backwards. 
Four species must be included in the first group, viz., the Tora, Swayne’s, 
Coke’s and Neumann’s hartebeests; and in the latter the Bubal, the West 
African, the Cape and the Lelwel, with all its local races. 
Curiously enough, there are neither wildebeests nor any species of 
broad-horned hartebeests to the west of the Nile, nor, with the exception 
of the Lelwel or Jackson’s hartebeest, which is found over a limited area in 
the country to the north of the Victoria Nyanza Lake, are any hartebeests 
with horns of the narrow upright type found to the east of that great river, 
and it is more than probable, I think, that these came originally from the 
west, their ancestors having made their way south, together with the 
grass -eating white rhinoceroses, before their path was barred by the 
gradual spread eastwards of the great Congo forest. Lelwel hartebeests 
might then have worked round the Victoria Nyanza Lake to the north and 
east, whilst the white rhinoceroses, which would naturally have followed 
the open grass lands of the watershed between the tributaries of the Congo 
and the Zambesi, trended to the south-west. 
The distribution of the fauna of Africa at the present day, and the fact 
that some of the most typical of African animals, such as the zebras, 
wildebeests, wide-horned hartebeests, and straight -horned oryx antelopes, 
are entirely absent from the whole of Africa to the west of the Nile, 
whilst the curved-horned oryx, the curious addra gazelle, the round-eared, 
large -horned eland, and the white rhinoceros are unknown in any part 
of the country to the east of it, would seem to show that Africa received 
the ancestors of its present fauna from two sources, Europe and Asia, 
and also that before the migration of the paloearctic fauna into Africa 
many distinct species in the various genera into which the antelopes and 
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