The second group, or Caprinae, includes the sheep and goats, which are smaller animals than most of the Bovidae, generally with horns in both sexes, but those of the females small. In the males the horns are usually compressed and triangular, with transverse ridges or knobs, and either curving backwards or spiral. The muzzle is narrow and hairy; and when face-glands are present these are small and insignificant; while the tail is short and flattened. Unlike the Bovinae, there are frequently glands in the feet; and the upper molar teeth differ from those of that group in their narrower crowns, which lack a distinct inner column. When a face-pit is present in the skull it is small. The genera are Ovis (sheep), Capra (goats) and Hemitragus (tahr). Sheep and goats are very nearly related, but the former never have a beard on the chin of the males, which are devoid of a strong odour; and their horns are typically of a different type. There are, however, several more or less transitional forms. Tahr are short-horned goats. The group is unknown in America, and in Africa is only represented in the mountains of the north, extending, however, some distance south into the Sudan and Abyssinia. All the species are mountain-dwellers. (See [Udad], [Argali], [Goat], [Ibex], [Mouflon], [Sheep] and [Tahr].)
The musk-ox (Ovibos moschatus) alone represents the family Ovibovinae, which is probably most nearly related to the next group (see [Musk-ox]).
Next come the Rupicaprinae, which include several genera of mountain-dwelling ruminants, typified by the European chamois (Rupicapra); the other genera being the Asiatic serow, goral and takin, and the North American Rocky Mountain goat. These ruminants are best described as goat-like antelopes. (See [Antelope], [Chamois], [Goral], [Rocky Mountain Goat], [Serow] and [Takin].)
Under the indefinable term “antelope” (q.v.) may be included the seven remaining sections, namely Tragelaphinae (kudu and eland), Hippotraginae (sable antelope and oryx), Antilopinae (black-buck, gazelles, &c.), Cervicaprinae (reedbuck and waterbuck), Neotraginae (klipspringer and steinbok), Cephalophinae (duikers and four-horned antelopes) and Bubalinae (hartebeests and gnus).
(R. L.*)
BOVILL, SIR WILLIAM (1814-1873), English judge, a younger son of Benjamin Bovill, of Wimbledon, was born at All-hallows, Barking, on the 26th of May 1814. On leaving school he was articled to a firm of solicitors, but entering the Middle Temple he practised for a short time as a special pleader below the bar. He was called in 1841 and joined the home circuit. His special training in a solicitor’s office, and its resulting connexion, combined with a thorough knowledge of the details of engineering, acquired through his interest in a manufacturing firm in the east end of London, soon brought him a very extensive patent and commercial practice. He became Q.C. in 1855, and in 1857 was elected M.P. for Guildford. In the House of Commons he was very zealous for legal reform, and the Partnership Law Amendment Act 1865, which he helped to pass, is always referred to as Bovill’s Act. In 1866 he was appointed solicitor-general, an office which he vacated on becoming chief justice of the common pleas in succession to Sir W. Erie in November of the same year. He died at Kingston, Surrey, on the 1st of November 1873. As a barrister he was unsurpassed for his remarkable knowledge of commercial law; and when promoted to the bench his painstaking labour and unswerving uprightness, as well as his great patience and courtesy, gained for him the respect and affection of the profession.
BOVILLAE, an ancient town of Latium, a station on the Via Appia (which in 293 B.C. was already paved up to this point), 11 m. S.E. of Rome. It was a colony of Alba Longa, and appears as one of the thirty cities of the Latin league; after the destruction of Alba Longa the sacra were, it was held, transferred to Bovillae, including the cult of Vesta (in inscriptions virgines Vestales Albanae are mentioned, and the inhabitants of Bovillae are always spoken of as Albani Longani Bovillenses) and that of the gens Iulia. The existence of this hereditary worship led to an increase in its importance when the Julian house rose to the highest power in the state. The knights met Augustus’s dead body at Bovillae on its way to Rome, and in A.D. 16 the shrine of the family worship was dedicated anew,[1] and yearly games in the circus instituted, probably under the charge of the sodales Augustales, whose official calendar has been found here. In history Bovillae appears as the scene of the quarrel between Milo and Clodius, in which the latter, whose villa lay above the town on the left of the Via Appia, was killed. The site is not naturally strong, and remains of early fortifications cannot be traced. It may be that Bovillae took the place of Alba Longa as a local centre after the destruction of the latter by Rome, which would explain the deliberate choice of a strategically weak position. Remains of buildings of the imperial period—the circus, a small theatre, and edifices probably connected with the post-station—may still be seen on the south-west edge of the Via Appia.
See L. Canina, Via Appia (Rome, 1853), i. 202 seq.; T. Ashby in Mélanges de l’école française de Rome (1903), p. 395.