422 
AFRICAN GAME ANIMALS 
of most of the members; narrow in only one species, the 
common eland. The tail varies greatly from the short, 
bushy tail of the bushbuck to the long, tufted tail of the 
eland. The skull has long nasal bones, short snout and short 
nasal cavity, and no lachrymal vacuity in front of the orbit. 
A large sinus is present between the nasal and lachrymal 
glands as in the waterbucks. 
The effort to divide this family into genera and species 
is fraught with difficulties that illustrate clearly how arti¬ 
ficial the terms “genus,” and “species” are. It is absolutely 
necessary to employ the terms and in some cases they meet 
all the needs of the situation, but in other cases, as with the 
tragelaphs, all that can be said is that they are necessary 
but that they are also unsatisfactory. 
Nearly all the species of the Tragelafihincz are so closely 
allied that they might all be included in a single genus. 
Such an arrangement would, however, result in consider¬ 
able geographical confusion and obscure the real relation¬ 
ships of the species. Nevertheless, the attempt to make the 
genera of equal weight so as to express the relationships 
clearly, or avoid confusion, results in a multiplicity of 
genera; and this means splitting into groups a number of 
closely allied species. In fact, arguments of some weight 
can be advanced for either uniting all the tragelaphs into 
one genus, or for making almost as many genera as there are 
species; and in this same way arguments can be advanced 
for both splitting up into a large number of species, and 
for reducing the great majority of these from specific to 
subspecific rank. The genera adopted by most writers 
are based almost solely upon horn characters. As a single 
character, the shape of the horns is certainly the most re- 
