White. — A Philological Study. 137 



The Greek word 0-qp (ther), in an equal manner to the German 

 wild, indicates specially hunting and the killing of feral 

 animals, as thera, hunting, the animal hunted and caught ; 

 therao, to hunt ; therates, a hunter or pursuer; therion, a wild 

 beast ; theriodes, savage, fierce. This word also, with varying 

 suffixes, refers to the gladiatorial encounters with wild beasts 

 within the enclosed area of the amphitheatre. English hind, 

 the female of the stag, I would suppose to refer to the habit of 

 the females composing the harem of the stag in following the 

 lead of their lord and master — that is, in the meaning of hinder 

 ones — Anglo-Saxon, hind; Dutch, hinde. 



It is noticeable that to define the sex of many of these 

 wild animals the term buck is used for the males, and kuh, 

 cow, kalb, calf, is used, especially in the German or Teutonic, 

 to define the female and her young ; but we do not find any 

 word equivalent to bull (German stier) to mean the male of 

 any of the animals mentioned. At a later date, however, 

 in America the male moose is called the bull and his consort 

 the coiv, yet they are of the order Cervidce, and carry solid 

 branching antlers, which are annually cast. The Germans 

 have renn-thier-kuh, the female reindeer, but the use of kuh, a 

 cow, could hardly originate in connection with a reindeer, 

 for surely it must belong by right to the female of the ox. 

 If so, the special definition of the sexes of the above animals 

 must have remained in abeyance until after the knowledge 

 of or the domestication of the ox. But, if so, why not 

 also the use of an equivalent to bull to denote the males, 

 as in the bull, cow, and calf of the whale and seal ? If 

 used to the walrus, we would have whale, horse, bull, &c, 

 from ros, a horse. In place of bull we get buck or boc. Now, 

 this name certainly is an original term for the male goat. In 

 German geiss and zeigel both mean the female goat, to which 

 is added the suffix bock, to mean the male ; at the same 

 time German bock is a male goat, and we find its variants 

 in Anglo-Saxon bucca, Dutch bok, Icelandic bukkr, Danish 

 buk, Welsh bivch, Gaelic boc, and even Sanskrit bukka. And 

 English butcher comes through mid-English bocher, French 

 boucher, originally meaning "one who kills goats," from old 

 French boc (French, boac), a he goat. These people, there- 

 fore, must have known and held in domestication the goat 

 previous to the use of the word buck to denote the male of 

 different species of Cervidce, and, in fact, the use or equivalent 

 of the German wild must have been greatly modified since 

 first coined, unless we are to come to the conclusion that 

 those people using it to mean feral animals had already several 

 kinds of domestic or tame animals, and we might also say 

 birds, meaning the specially tame bird Gallus domesticus 

 (the cock and hen of our poultry-yards — hahn and henne of 



