304 MOSTLY MAMMALS 



a ring fence than many islands of less than half its 

 acreage, and this may really bring it, so far as the de- 

 velopment of animal life is concerned, into the same 

 category as a small island. 



Be this as it may, Celebes has the distinction of being 

 the home of the smallest living representative of the wild 

 cattle, or, indeed, of the wild cattle of any period of the 

 earth's history, for no equally diminutive fossil member of 

 the group appears to be known. An idea of the extremely 

 diminutive proportions of the anoa, or sapi-utan, as the 

 animal in question is respectively called by the inhabitants 

 of Celebes and the Malays, may be gained when it is 

 stated that its height at the shoulder is only about 3 ft. 

 3 in., whereas that of the great Indian wild ox, or gaur, 

 is at least 6 ft. 4 in. In fact, the anoa is really not 

 much, if at all, larger than a well-grown Southdown sheep, 

 and scarcely exceeds in this respect the little domesticated 

 Indian Bramini cattle. 



The anoa has many of the characters of the large 

 Indian buffalo, but its horns are relatively shorter, less 

 curved, and more upright. In this, as well as in certain 

 other respects, it is more like the young than the adult 

 of the last-named species ; and as young animals fre- 

 quently show ancestral features which are gradually lost 

 as maturity is approached, it would be a natural suppo- 

 sition that the anoa is a primitive type of buffalo. This 

 idea receives a remarkable confirmation from the circum- 

 stance that in the later Tertiary strata of Northern India 

 there occur skulls of anoa-like buffaloes, which, however, 

 in correlation with the continental area where they are 

 met with, indicate animals of considerably larger dimen- 

 sions than the living Celebes animal. In fact the latter, 

 together with the somewhat larger wild buffalo, or 



