240 TRANSACTIONS, NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY OF GLASGOW, 



also prove that in the middle of the sixth century these 

 animals were found, although rarely, in the province of 

 Maine ; while there is evidence that some of them at least 

 -were white in colour." These statements, especially the last 



as regards colour, I have been 

 unable to verify. According 

 to contemnorary accounts, Urus 

 (Fig. 10) differed from tame 

 cattle onlv in beinsr black, 

 and having a whitish stripe on 

 the back. In length, 11 to 12 

 feet, the height at the shoulders 

 was about 6 J feet.i Compare 

 this animal with what has been 

 called its degenerate descendant. 

 The purely park life — i.e., the 

 small and restricted enclosure 

 we call a park — of the latter can only have been for a few 

 centuries, and yet it has sadly degenerated, if it is possible 

 to degenerate so rapidly. 

 Granting that the appear- 

 ance of black calves in- 

 dicates an ancestor such 

 as the Urus, which we 

 know to have been black, 

 in our white park cattle, 

 then the prevailing 

 white colour must in- 

 dicate a period of domes- 

 tication and breeding 

 by selection, so that they cannot possibly be wild. But the horns 



Fig. 11. — Form of horn after 



the Gisbiirne Cross. 



From the Zoologist, March, 1891. 



Fig. 12. — Form of horn before the 



Gisburne Cross in 1859. 

 From the Zoologist, March, 1891. 



^ Herberstein writes, that ' ' Masovia, which borders on Lithuania, is the 

 only province which has in it the kind of buffalo which, in the language of 

 the country, is called thiet', bnt which we Germans may, with propriety, 

 call iirox. They are a sort of wild oxen, not unlike tame oxen, except that 

 they are entirely black, with a line down the hack having wliite blended 

 with it. The}^ are not vp.vy plentiful, and there are certain districts which 

 are charged with the care of them ; and it is only in some few preserves 

 that they are kept." 



