e systematic naturalists
have separated them into a great many genera--twenty or more--and to
these genera they have given such a variety of pedantic titles, that it
would be wellnigh impossible for one man's memory to retain them all. I
do not hesitate to say, that it would have been much wiser to have
retained the nomenclature of the old naturalists, and called all these
animals _antelopes_--leaving the specific appellations to distinguish
them from one another.

In a popular sketch it is necessary to treat them in this way; for to
give even a list of the generic characters of the systematic naturalists
would occupy the whole of our space.

First, then, of the number of these ruminants--that is, the number of
kinds. In this respect they exceed the deer tribe, amounting in all to
between eighty and ninety distinct kinds. Perhaps there are one hundred
species upon the whole earth, since several new ones have been recently
discovered in the interior regions of Asia and Africa.

It is scarcely necessary to say that Africa is the great head-quarters
of the antelope tribe--more than half the species belonging to that
continent. In number of individuals, too, it far excels; the vast herds
of these animals that roam over the karoos and great plains of South
Africa consisting sometimes of numbers countless as locusts or the sands
of the sea! Asia, however, is not without its share of species; and
especially that portion of it--the Oriental region--so rich in other
mammalia. In Australia no antelope has yet been found; nor even in the
large island of Madagascar, so African in its character. Only one
representative of the antelopes is indigenous to the New World--the
Prong-horn of the prairies; for the Bighorn of the Rocky Mountains is a
sheep, not an antelope. To say the least, this is a natural fact of
some singularity; for from all we know of the habits of these animals,
no country could be better suited to their existence than the great
prairies of North America, or the llanos of the Orinoco, the paramos of
Brazil, and the pampas of Buenos Ayres and Patagonia. And yet on these
South American plains no animal of the genus _antelope_ has yet been
discovered;--and on the prairies, as already mentioned, only one
species, the Prong-horn.

It is worthy of remark, also, that in Africa, where the antelopes most
abound, no deer are found to exist in the few African species of the
latter being denizens only of the extreme