
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, taking Professor Riitimeyer’s 
three forms, 7.¢e., Bos primigenius, Los taurus frontosus, and Bos 
tawrus brachyceros (the peat cow), adds to it Bos tawrus brachy- 
cephalus. Representatives of this form, he says, are the breed of 
Alpine cattle in the Eastern Tyrol, in Duxerthal, and the 
Zellerthal, and the closely allied Enngerthal cattle of the Canton 
Vaud. These, he considers, descend not from the Urus, but from 
the Bison. Werner and Weissenhorn 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 probably 
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 domestieated. Anyway the Bison can have nothing to do 
with our breeds. Bison bones in Britain are found only in the 
older gravel terraces of the rivers which ran at a higher level 
than now, while the bones of the Bos are found in fens and 
modern alluvial deposits.1 The Bison and Bos may have had a 
common ancestral form. Professor Riitimeyer is of opinion that 
the genus Bubalus, as represented by the early forms of Indian 
oxen from the older Pliocene deposits of the Sewalick Hills, may 
have been probably the ancestral stock from which the later types 
of Bison and Bos originated. Professor Wilckens himself, writing 
on the ancestors of the Bovide and fossil Bovide, 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 North Sea and the Baltic, the breeds 
of Friesland, Holland, Holstein, and Podolia, as modified 
descendants of 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 

1 Some of our authorities state that the fossil remains of Bos primigenius 
are found only in British palxolithic deposits, but not in neolithic, 
