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THE GAUR AND THE GAYAL. 

 (BOS GAURUS AND BOS FRONTALIS.) 



Br E. C. Stuart Baker, f.z.s. 



During the last thirteen years I have been collecting a large mass 

 of material, with a view to trying to prove either that the gaur and the 

 gayal are one and the same, or else that they are specifically distinct 

 from one another. During the first two or three years of this period I 

 held the opinion that they were identical. After this I veered round a 

 good deal, and began to think that the reasons for considering them 

 to be distinct might be right; this, because I quite failed to obtain 

 certain necessary links between the two forms. The years 1897 

 to 1899, however, produced specimens which have shewn every one 

 of these same links, and I am now forced to the conclusion that 

 there is no difference of specific value between the two animals, such 

 differences as do exist being principally, if not entirely, the result of 

 domestication. 



The question is one which has repeatedly cropped up in various 

 papers, both scientific and otherwise, and on the 13th, 20th and 27th 

 August and 3rd September 1898, a certain amount of correspondence 

 again appeared in The Field^ but no further light was shewn by this, 

 unless it was to prove that certain characteristics, said to be typical of 

 the one so called species, were often shewn also by the other. Colonel 

 Pollok, who says that his " experience of the gaur has been very 

 extensive," makes one or two slips which shew that, however extensive 

 his experience may be, a few of the most simple of facts have quite 

 evaded it. Amongst other things he says : " Tbe points of all young 

 bulls turn in like the horns of the cows, but as age creeps on this is 

 lost." Now as a matter of fact the young bull calf has horns which do 

 not turn in at all ; they at first grow out almost straight from the sides 

 of the forehead, later on they commence to turn up, but it is not until 

 the end of the second year, at the very earliest, that they begin to turn 

 in. In the second series of woodcuts, carefully reproduced from 

 photos, I include that of a typical young bull calf (No. 2 G) above two 

 and a half years old, which was shot by myself in 1893 in company 

 with Mr. J. Clark, C.S. This head should be compared with No. 2 K, 

 that of a typical wild cow, and the comparison will shew at once how 

 widely mistaken Colonel Pollok is in bis assertion. 



I quite agree with Colonel Pollok in thinking that Mr. Sanderson's 

 supposed gayal was nothing but a gaur, but in the absence of any proof 



