Part 22

“Good paintings of animals give much clearer ideas than descriptions. Whoever looks at the picture, which was done under my eye by Mr. Stubbs, that excellent painter of animals, can never be at a loss to know the Nyl-ghau, wherever he may happen to meet with it. However, I shall attempt a description of the animal; and then give as much of its history as I have been hitherto able to learn. The account will be imperfect: yet it will give naturalists some pleasure in the meantime to know even a little of a large and elegant animal, which has not hitherto been described or painted.”

After a capital description of both sexes of this animal from the living specimens, Hunter proceeds as follows:—

“Of late years several of this species, both male and female, have been brought to England. The first were sent from Bombay by Gov. Cromelen, as a present to Lord Clive: they arrived in August 1767. They were male and female, and continued to breed every year. Afterwards two were brought over, and presented to the Queen by Mr. Sullivan. From Her Majesty’s desire to encourage every useful or curious enquiry in natural knowledge, I was permitted to keep these two for some time, which enabled me to describe them, and to get a correct picture made, and, with my brother’s assistance, to dissect the dead animal, and preserve the skin and skeleton. Lord Clive has been so kind to give me every help that he could furnish me with in making out their history; so has General Carnac, and some other gentlemen.

“At all the places in India, where we have settlements, they are rarities, brought from the distant interior parts of the country, as presents to Nabobs and great men. Lord Clive, General Carnac, Mr. Walsh, Mr. Watts, and many other gentlemen, who have seen much of India, tell me they never saw them wild. So far as I have yet found, Bernier is the only author who has ever mentioned them.

“In the fourth vol. of his Mémoires, he gives an account of a journey which he undertook, ann. 1664, from Delhi, to the province of Cachemire, with the Mogul Aurengzeb, who went to that terrestrial paradise, as it is esteemed by the Indians, to avoid the heat of the summer. In giving an account of the hunting, which was the Emperor’s amusement in this journey, he describes, among others, that of le Nyl-ghau, but without saying more of the animal than that the Emperor sometimes kills them in such numbers as to distribute quarters of them to all his Omrachs; which shows that they were there wild, and in plenty, and esteemed good or delicious food.

“This agrees with the rarity of these animals at Bengal, Madras, and Bombay; for Cachemire is the most northern province of the Empire, and it was on the march from Delhi to that place that Bernier saw the Emperor hunt them.”

Although, as we have already seen, living specimens of the Nilgai were long ago brought to Europe, little addition was made to our knowledge of this animal in its native state until the days of Elliot, Jerdon, and Hodgson. In 1839 Sir Walter Elliot included the Nilgai in his catalogue of the Mammals of the Southern Mahratta country, where he states “it is found in the thick low jungles.” Jerdon, in his volume on the Mammals of India, tells us that the Nilgai “frequents thin forests and low jungles, but is also often found in tolerably open plains with only a few scattered bushes. It associates in small herds, varying from 7 or 8 to 20 and upwards.”

Mr. Robert A. Sterndale, whose popular manual on the Mammals of India and Ceylon was published in 1884, does not speak favourably of his experience of the flesh of the Nilgai as an article of diet:—“The Nilgao,” he says, “feeds on Beyr (Zizyphus jujuba) and other trees, and at times devours such quantities of the intensely acrid berries of the Aoula (Phyllanthus emblica) that its flesh becomes saturated with the bitter elements of the fruit. This is most noticeable in soup, less so in a steak, which is at times not bad. The tongue and marrow-bones, however, are generally as much as the sportsman claims, and in the Central Provinces at least the natives are grateful for all the rest.”

Col. Kinloch, who writes of the Nilgai mainly from a sporting point of view, gives us the following account of this animal:—

“The Nilgai does not hold a very high place among the Game-animals of India, and is seldom shot by any but young sportsmen, unless meat is required for camp-followers. It is, however, one of the largest and most conspicuous of the ruminants to be found in the plains, and no records of Indian sport would be complete without some notice of it.

“The bull is a large and powerful beast, attaining a height of at least 14 hands at the withers, which are high and narrow like those of a horse. The neck is long and compressed, and the head slender and deer-like, the eyes being remarkably full and lustrous. The hind-quarters fall away considerably, giving the animal rather an awkward appearance. The legs are slender and wiry, and the hoofs rather upright. The tail is tufted, something like that of the domestic cow, but it is not so long in proportion, reaching only to the hocks. The color is a dark bluish grey, deepening to nearly black in very old individuals, while the legs are jet-black, curiously marked with white patches about the fetlocks. The throat is white, and from the lower part of it depends a long tuft of blackish hair, while the hair on the withers is developed into a thin upright mane.

“The cow is of a light brown colour, and is destitute of horns. The young males are like the females, but become gradually darker with age.

“Nilgai inhabit extensive grass-and tree-jungles, but appear to prefer those that are not very thick, and interspersed with occasional bare open spaces. Their favorite cover seems to be that composed of the ‘dhák’ or ‘palás’ tree (Butea frondosa). They are also fond of resorting to the sugar-cane fields, and they frequently commit considerable damage among cultivation. They are generally to be found in herds, varying in number from four or five to twenty, and composed of both sexes; but occasionally small parties of old Blue Bulls, and even solitary bulls, are to be met with. In places where they are not disturbed, especially in some of the Native States, Nilgai are absurdly tame, but in districts where they are much molested they become extremely shy and wary. It must not therefore be supposed that they can always be easily shot, but they afford such a poor trophy that, as already mentioned, they are not much sought after. When they can be found sufficiently far from thick cover, they may be speared, and they then show capital sport; as they will probably lead a well-mounted horseman a chase of several miles. On hard ground I doubt if a cow Nilgai could be speared by a solitary hunter; the bull, being much heavier, is more easily ridden down.

“The flesh of a cow Nilgai is occasionally excellent, and the tongue and marrow-bones are supposed to be delicacies. They are, however, hardly worth shooting, except when one is in want of meat for Mahomedan servants: Hindoos, of course, will not touch the flesh.”

The Nilgai does well in captivity, and, as we have already mentioned, several of the original descriptions of this animal by the older writers were based on specimens brought alive to Europe. In 1824 both sexes of the Nilgai were well figured by Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and F. Cuvier in their

‘Histoire Naturelle des Mammifères,’ from specimens living in the Jardin des Plantes. In 1845, as we learn from Gray, the Nilgai bred in the Knowsley Menagerie, and there was at that time a herd of a male and four females kept in one of the paddocks along with the Elands. In 1847 the half-grown male and young were drawn from some of these specimens by Waterhouse Hawkins, and the figures were published in the twenty-ninth plate of the ‘Gleanings.’ The Nilgai has been an inhabitant of the Zoological Society’s Menagerie from its commencement. In 1830 it was described and figured in the first of the two volumes on the ‘Gardens and Menagerie of the Zoological Society’ by Vigors and Bennett, and in February 1831, as recorded in the ‘Proceedings,’ a specimen of a young one, born at the Society’s farm at Kingston, was exhibited and described at one of the Scientific Meetings. This appears to have been the first instance of its breeding in the Society’s Gardens, but since that date many other examples have been received, and the species has frequently bred in the Menagerie. On referring to the Society’s registers we find that this has taken place in 1856, 1864, 1866, 1868, and 1869. As a general rule, two young ones are produced at the same birth; but the young animals, although they thrive well, are excessively shy and timid, as is also the case with many others of the Deer and Antelopes, so that, if frightened, they frequently injure themselves by rushing against the fences of their paddocks.

Our coloured illustration of the Nilgai (Plate LXXXVII.) has been prepared from specimens of both sexes of this animal now living in the Zoological Society’s Gardens, where they were received in exchange on October 14th, 1896.

There is a good mounted example of the male Nilgai in the British Museum, obtained from the Zoological Society’s Gardens in 1896, besides two other older mounted specimens kept in store. There are also specimens of heads of this animal from the Khalcote jungle south of Mhow, presented by Col. J. Evans, and from Jullunder near Sangor, presented by Mr. G. A. Carmichael, and some skulls and horns from Oude and the North-west Provinces, presented by Mr. A. O. Hume, C.B. From the last of these the drawings of the skull and horns and frontlet of an adult male (figs. 98 and 99) have been prepared.

November, 1899.

Genus II. TRAGELAPHUS.

Type.

Tragelaphus, =De Blainv.= Bull. Soc. Philom. 1816, p. 75 T. sylvaticus.

Euryceros, =Gray=, Cat. Rum. B. M. p. 47 (1872) T. eurycerus.

Large or medium-sized Antelopes, with the facial, neck, body, and leg markings characteristic of the subfamily usually well expressed.

Hind-quarters as high as or higher than the withers; fore limbs not longer than hind limbs. Hoofs of normal form, their length along the anterior border about equal to the basal width from back to front; posterior surface of the pasterns covered with hair. Ears large and expanded.

Horns present only in the male; of medium length or long, always longer than the face; flat at the base behind; with a strong external basal ridge arising just behind the orbit and forming an obtuse angle with the plane of the nasals; spirally twisted, the twist affecting the whole horn with the exception of its extreme tip, but shallow and not taking the form of an open corkscrew spiral; the anterior ridge, which starts in front of the middle of the base of the horn, only reappearing once close to the tip.

Skull much less flat than in Boselaphus, the parietal region more depressed. Molar teeth with short crowns; those of the upper jaw with only a small accessory column.

Range of the Genus. Africa, south of the Sahara, from Senegambia, Abyssinia, and Somaliland, over the whole continent.