WHITE CATTLE : AN INQUIRY INTO THEIR ORIGIN, ETC. 235 



cattle ; and British rubbish-heaps that have been explored show 

 only one variety, Bos longifrons. thus confirming Professor Owen's 

 statement. 



Professor Wilckens, of Vienna, takinsc Professor Riitimever's 

 three forms, i.e., Bos primigenius, Bos taunts frontosus. and Bos 

 taurus brachyceros (the peat cow), adds to it Bos taurus hrachy- 

 cephalus. Representatives of this form, he says, are the breed of 

 Alpine cattle in the Eastern Tyrol, in Duxerthal, and the 

 Zeilerthal, and the closely allied Enngerthal cattle of the Canton 

 Vaud, These, he considers, descend not from the XJrus. but from 

 the Bison. Werner and AVeissenhorn either make no mention of 

 this form, or do not accept it, on the grounds of the natural 

 antipathy that the Bison shows to Bos taurus, and that all such 

 artificially procured mixed breeds have failed. This probablv 

 applies to the European Bison. The American Bison has been 

 crossed with the domestic cow and the wild oxen of India, and 

 the hybrids have proved fertile. But this has been accomplished 

 when domesticated. Anyway the Bison can have nothing to do 

 with our breeds. Bison bones in Britain are found onlv in the 

 older gravel terraces of the rivers which ran at a hio-her level 

 than now, while the bones of the Bos are found in fens and 

 modern alluvial deposits. ^ The Bison and Bos mav have had a 

 common ancestral form. Professor Biitimeyer is of opinion that 

 the genus Bubalus, as represented by the early forms of Indian 

 oxen from the older Pliocene deoosits of the Sewalick Hill?, mav 

 have been probably the ancestral stock from which the later types 

 of Bison and Bos oris'inated. Professor AYilckens himself, writinsr 

 on the ancestors of the Bovidse and fossil Bovid^e, considers their 

 earliest form to be Gelocus in the Eocene period, first described 

 by Kowalevsky. 



Most German authorities now regard the tame breeds of the 

 lowlands bordering on the Xorth Sea and the Baltic, the breeds 

 of Friesland, Holland, Holstein, and Podolia, as modified 

 descendants or the Urus. The heavy spotted breeds of Central 

 Europe, the spotted cattle of French, Swiss, South German, and 

 Scandinavian races, with rudimentary horns or minus horns, as 

 coming from the quaternary ox, Bos frontosus ; and to Bos 



^ Some of our authorities state that the fossil remains of Bos py^imigenius 

 are found only in British paleolithic deposits, but not in neolithic. 



