Skull long and narrow, with a heavy muzzle. Anteorbital fossæ obsolete. Nasals long and broad. Basal length (in a not fully adult specimen) 9 inches, greatest breadth 4·1, muzzle to orbit 5·5.
Horns short in proportion to the size of the animal; heavily and closely ringed; basally they are parallel to each other, diverging above, with their tips again gently curved in towards each other.
Female. Similar, but without horns.
Hab. Northern and Eastern Mongolia, and southern borders of Russian Transbaikalia.
The great traveller and naturalist, Peter Simon Pallas, whose name we have already often mentioned in the course of this work, was the first technical describer of this Antelope, although he was by no means its discoverer, for he himself quotes previous references to it in the works of older authors. But Pallas, in the Supplement to his memoir on the Antelopes, published 1777, gave us the first scientific description of it, and selected for it the appropriate scientific name gutturosa, by which it has been ever since known. According to Pallas, the first Europeans to become acquainted with this Gazelle were the Jesuit missionaries in China, one of whom, Pereira, as quoted by Witsenius, mentions it as a Chinese animal; while Du Halde, in his great work upon China, describes it, under the name “Hoang-yang” or Capra flava, as wandering about in large flocks in the deserts of Mongolia. Further accounts of this Antelope were subsequently given by Messerschmidt and Gmelin in the Commentaries of the St. Petersburg Academy. These are also quoted by Pallas, who himself met with this animal on the upper course of the River Onon, on the southern frontiers of Transbaikalia. Pallas concludes his history of this species with a lengthened description of its external form and anatomy, and gives an uncoloured figure, in which the peculiar swollen condition of the throat in the male in the breeding-season (whence it was termed gutturosa) is correctly shown.
Pallas’s posthumous work, ‘Zoographia Rosso-Asiatica,’ contains little more than a summary of his previous account of this animal.
The numerous authors who followed Pallas added little or nothing to our knowledge of the Mongolian Gazelle, and were content to base their notices of it almost entirely upon his publications. It is not, in fact, until we come to nearly modern days that we obtain any further original information concerning this animal.
Dr. Gustav Radde, now Director of the Museum at Tiflis, made extensive journeys in South-eastern Siberia, under the patronage of the Imperial Geographical Society of Russia, in 1855 and the three following years, and amassed large zoological collections. One of the volumes of his ‘Reisen im Süden von Ost-Sibirien,’ published at St. Petersburg in 1862, is devoted to an account of the Mammals of South-eastern Siberia, and is, and will long remain, our standard work on this subject. Dr. Radde brought home five good specimens of this Antelope, and commences his account of it with accurate descriptions of its summer and winter pelages. He adds a detailed description of its skull and dentition, and compares them at length with those of Gazella subgutturosa.
As regards its distribution in the present epoch, Dr. Radde points out that, like the Dziggetai (Equus hemionus) and the Argali Sheep (Ovis ammon), the Mongolian Gazelle has retreated to the south and east from the Russian frontiers since the days of Pallas. There are at present only two places on the southern borderlands of Transbaikalia in which this Antelope remains during the summer and breeds every year. One of these is a district east of the Dsŭn-tarei which is seldom entered even by the shepherds of the Cossacks. It is an uninhabited and rather mountainous country, without wood or bushes, varied by salt-and some freshwater lakes, and covered only with yellow Elymus-grasses. The other district, which is of a similar character, lies north of the left bank of the Argunj, where this river enters into the Russian territories between the border-posts of Soktui and Abagaitui.
Dr. Radde gives the following account of the habits of this animal as observed by himself and as obtained from the reports of the natives in 1856:—