ch. n] ANTELOPE 47 
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 express 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 44 antelope ” was also already a name of 
general, though vague, currency for some wild creatures, 
they called everything an antelope that did not seem to 
come in one of the more familiar domestic categories. 
Study has shown that sheep and goats grade into one 
another among the wild species ; and the so-called 
antelopes include forms differing from one another quite 
as sharply as any of them differ from their kinsfolk that 
are represented in the farmyard. 
Zebras share with hartebeest the distinction of being 
the most abundant game animal on the plains, through¬ 
out the whole Athi region. The two creatures are fond 
of associating together, usually in mixed herds, but 
sometimes there will merely be one or two individuals 
of one species in a big herd of the other. They are 
sometimes, though less frequently than the hartebeest, 
