ANTE-FIXAE (from Lat. antefigere, to fasten before), the vertical blocks which terminate the covering tiles of the roof of a Greek temple; as spaced they take the place of the cymatium and form a cresting along the sides of the temple. The face of the ante-fixae was richly carved with the anthemion (q.v.) ornament.
ANTELOPE, a zoological name which, so far as can be determined, appears to trace its origin, through the Latin, to Pantholops, the old Coptic, and Antholops, the late Greek name of the fabled unicorn. Its adoption by the languages of Europe cannot apparently be traced farther back than the 4th century of our era, at which date it was employed to designate an imaginary animal living on the banks of the Euphrates. By the earlier English naturalists, and afterwards by Buffon, it was, however, applied to the Indian blackbuck, which is thus entitled to rank as the antelope. It follows that the subfamily typified by this species, in which are included the gazelles, is the one to which alone the term antelopes should be applied if it were employed in a restricted and definable sense.
Although most people have a general vague idea of what constitutes an “antelope,” yet the group of animals thus designated is one that does not admit of accurate limitations or definition. Some, for instance, may consider that the chamois and the so-called white goat of the Rocky Mountains are entitled to be included in the group; but this is not the view held by the authors of the Book of Antelopes referred to below; and, as a matter of fact, the term is only a vague designation for a number of more or less distinct groups of hollow-horned ruminants which do not come under the designation of cattle, sheep or goats; and in reality there ought to be a distinct English group-name for each subfamily into which “antelopes” are subdivided.
The great majority of antelopes, exclusive of the doubtful chamois group (which, however, will be included in the present article), are African, although the gazelles are to a considerable extent an Asiatic group. They include ruminants varying in size from a hare to an ox; and comprise about 150 species, although this number is subject to considerable variation according to personal views as to the limitations of species and races. No true antelopes are American, the prongbuck (Antilocapra), which is commonly called “antelope” in the United States, representing a distinct group; while, as already mentioned, the Rocky Mountain or white goat stands on the borderland between antelopes and goats.
| Fig. 1.—Female Bushbuck (Tragelaphus scriptus). |
The first group, or Tragelaphinae, is represented by the African elands (Taurotragus), bongo (Boöcercus), kudus (Strepsiceros) and bushbucks or harnessed antelopes (Tragelaphus), and the Indian nilgai (Boselaphus). Except in the bongo and elands, horns are present only in the males, and these are angulated and generally spirally twisted, and without rings. The muzzle is naked, small glands are present on the face below the eyes, and the tail is comparatively long. The colours are often brilliant; white spots and stripes being prevalent. The harnessed antelopes, or bushbucks, are closely allied to the kudus, from which they chiefly differ by the spiral formed by the horns generally having fewer turns. They include some of the most brilliantly coloured of all antelopes; the ornamentation taking the form of vertical white lines and rows of spots. Usually the sexes differ in colour. Whereas most of the species have hoofs of normal shape, in some, such as the nakong, or situtunga (Tragelaphus spekei), these are greatly elongated, in order to be suited for walking in soft mud, and these have accordingly been separated as Limnotragus. The last-named species spends most of its time in water, where it may be observed not infrequently among the reeds with all but its head and horns submerged. The true or smaller bushbucks, represented by the widely spread Tragelaphus scriptus, with several local races (fig. 1) are sometimes separated as Sylvicapra, leaving the genus Tragelaphus to be represented by the larger T. angasi and its relatives. The genus Strepsiceros is represented by the true or great kudu (S. capensis or S. strepsiceros), fig. 2, ranging from the Cape to Somaliland, and the smaller S. imberbis of North-East Africa, which has no throat-fringe. The large and brightly coloured bongo (Boöcercus euryceros) of the equatorial forest-districts serves in some respects to connect the bushbucks with the elands, having horns in both sexes, and a tufted tail, but a brilliant orange coat with vertical white stripes. Still larger are the elands, of which the typical Taurotragus oryx of the Cape is uniformly sandy-coloured, although stripes appear in the more northern T. o. livingstonei, while the black-necked eland (T. derbianus) of Senegambia and the Bahr-el-Ghazal district is a larger and more brilliantly coloured animal. The small horns and bluish-grey colour of the adult bulls serve to distinguish the Indian nilgai (q.v.), Boselaphus tragocamdus, from the other members of the subfamily.
| Fig. 2.—Male Kudu (Strepsicero capensis). |
The second group, which is mainly African, but also represented in Syria, is that of the Hippotraginae, typified by the sable antelope (Hippotragus niger) and roan antelope (H. equinus), but also including the oryxes (Oryx) and addax. These are for the most part large antelopes, with long cylindrical horns, which are present in both sexes, hairy muzzles, no face-glands, long tufted tails and tall thick molars of the ox-type. In Hippotragus the stout and thickly ringed horns rise vertically from a ridge above the eyes at an obtuse angle to the plane of the lower part of the face, and then sweep backwards in a bold curve; while there are tufts of long white hairs near the eyes. The sable antelope is a southern species in which both sexes are black or blackish when adult, while the lighter-coloured and larger roan antelope has a much wider distribution. The South African blauwbok (H. leucophaeus) is extinct. In the addax (Addax nasomaculatus), which is a distinct species common to North Africa and Syria, the ringed horns form an open spiral ascending in the plane of the face, and there is long, shaggy, dark hair on the fore-quarters in winter. The various species of oryx differ from Hippotragus by the absence of the white eye-tufts, and by the horns sloping backwards in the plane of the face. In the South African gemsbuck (Oryx gazella), fig. 3, the East African beisa or true oryx (O. beisa), and the white Arabian (O. beatrix) the horns are straight, but in the North African white oryx or algazel (O. leucoryx or O. algazal) they are scimitar-shaped, the colour of this species being white and pale chestnut (see [Addax], [Oryx], and [Sable Antelope]).