ON AN EAST AFRICAN RANCH 
47 
bulls, usually past their prime or not yet full grown. These 
bulls are often found in the company of hartebeests or 
zebras; and stray zebras and hartebeests are often found 
with the wildebeest herds. The stomachs of those I opened 
contained nothing but grass; they are grazers, not browsers. 
The hartebeest are much faster, and if really frightened 
speedily leave their clumsy-looking friends behind; but 
the wildebeest, as I have seen them, are by far the most 
wary. The wildebeest and zebra seemed to me to lie down 
less freely than the hartebeest; but I frequently came on 
herds of both lying down during the heat of the day. Some¬ 
times part of the herd will stand drowsily erect and the 
rest lie down. Near Kitanga there were three wildebeest 
which were usually found with a big herd of hartebeest, 
and which regularly every afternoon lay down for some 
hours, just as their friends did. The animal has a very 
bovine look; and though called an antelope it is quite 
as close kin to the oxen as it is to many of the other beasts 
also called antelope. The fact is that antelope is not an 
exact term at all, but merely means any hollow-horned 
ruminant which the observer happens to think is not a 
sheep, goat, or ox. When, with Linnaeus, the first serious 
effort at the systematization of living nature began, men 
naturally groped in the effort to see correctly and to ex¬ 
press what they saw. When they came to describe the 
hollow-horned ruminants, they, of course, already had 
names at hand for anything that looked like one of the 
domestic creatures with which they were familiar; and as 
“antelope” was also already a name of general, though 
vague, currency for some wild creatures, they called every¬ 
thing an antelope that did not seem to come in one of the 
