THIBET.
I. THE GOAT.
OF the Ruminating Animals, the most varied in their forms, the most beautiful and swift, are the Deer and Antelope tribes; the former furnished with solid antlers of bone, which, in all the species but one, are confined to the male, and which fall off after the season of sexual intercourse; the latter possessed of hollow horns, like those of the Ox, the Sheep, and the Goat, enveloping permanent nuclei of bone proceeding from the forehead. Of the many species of Deer, only one, the Reindeer, an inhabitant of the northern glacial region, has been subjected to true domesticity, although individuals of the other species may be readily tamed to submission and dependence. Of the Antelope tribes, all the species remain in a state of liberty, apparently endowed with instincts which cause them to shun the dangerous vicinage of man. But the Antelopes, wild, timid, and indocile as they seem, are most of them gentle and submissive when reared up under human protection, and might, doubtless, like their congeners, be reduced to domestication: and further, the Antelopes approach by insensible gradations to the forms of those animals which Nature has fashioned to subject themselves most readily to the physical force and moral influence of our race. At one point they are connected with the massive forms of the Bovine group, and at another they pass into the Goats so nearly, that the line which separates the species scarcely forms a natural boundary. The chief distinction between them and the Goats is in the bony nuclei of the horns, which, in the Antelopes, are hard and solid, in the Goats cellular, and communicating with the frontal sinuses. As the Antelopes pass into the Goats, so the latter pass into the Sheep. The internal organization of both the families is the same; they bear their young for the same period, have a similar sound of the voice, and they breed with one another, giving birth to a progeny partaking of the characters of the parents. Both are covered with a mixture of hair and wool; but in the Goats the true wool rarely predominates over the hair, so as to form the
