Fig. 87.
Front view of the head of the Beira.
During Mr. D. G. Elliot’s East-African expedition of 1896, Mr. Akeley, one of his party, obtained two examples of this Antelope on Nasr Hablod Mountain, near Hargeisa, in nearly the same district as that just described by Sir Edmund Loder. These specimens are now in the Field-Columbian Museum at Chicago.
The British Museum contains a mounted specimen of an adult male of the Beira (from which our figure, Plate LXXV., has been prepared by Mr. Smit) and a skin of a female of the same species purchased of Herr Menges, besides the two skins obtained by the Somalis for Capt. Swayne, as above mentioned, which have been presented to the Museum by Sclater. It contains also a skin and complete skeleton of a female of this Antelope presented by Capt. P. Z. Cox, as described above.
September, 1898.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] This species, although mentioned last in Pallas’s List, may be taken as the type of the genus, because the term “Antilope” is clearly based on Ray’s and Buffon’s name for the Black-buck (The Antelope; l’Antilope), quoted and identified by Pallas, and only used up to this date for this particular species. The ordinary justification for the same course, based on de Blainville’s revision of 1816, is, as in so many other cases, invalidated by the earlier work of Lichtenstein, by whom the Black-buck was placed among the “Gazellæ,” and not among the “Antilopæ genuinæ.”
[2] Saiga prisca, Nehring, N. Jahrb. f. Min., Geol. u. Pal. ii. p. 131 (1891).
[3] This species may be taken as the type of Gazella, as being the only one which is common to Lichtenstein’s original genus and to Blainville’s “Gazella” of 1816. The latter author is ordinarily quoted as the original founder of the name, and his list includes the best known species—G. dorcas. But Lichtenstein’s genus, two years earlier in date, does not contain G. dorcas at all, and the only way in which the name Gazella can be properly retained for this group is by regarding G. subgutturosa as its type.
[4] Przewalski’s ‘Mongolia,’ Morgan’s Translation, ii. pp. 208 et seqq.