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 
These statements, especially the last 
as regards colour, I have been 
? 
were white in colour.’ 
unable to verify. According 
to contemporary accounts, Urus 
(Fig. 10) differed from tame 
cattle only in being black, 
and having a whitish stripe on 
the back. In length, 11 to 12 
feet, the height at the shoulders 
was about 64 feet.1 Compare 

this animal with what has been 
Frc. 11.—Form of horn after called its degenerate descendant. 
the Gisburne Cross. The purely park life—ie., the 
From the Zoologist, March, 1891. gyal] 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 eae 
white colour must in- Fig. 12.—Form of horn before the 
dicate a period of domes- Gisburne Cross in 1859. 
tication and breeding From the Zoologist, March, 1891. 
by seleetion, so that they cannot possibly be wild. But the horns 


1 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 thier, but which we Germans may, with propriety, 
call wrox. They are a sort of wild oxen, not unlike tame oxen, except that 
they are entirely black, with a line down the back having white blended 
with it. They are not very 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.” 
