NATURAL HISTORY. 
Kenhawa, broke a young buffalo to 
the plough ; having yoked it witha 
steer taken from his tame cattle. 
The buffalo performed to admira- 
tion. Enquiring of the man, whe- 
ther he had any fault to find with 
the buffalo’s performance, he an- 
swered, there was but one objection 
to it: the step of the buffalo was 
too quick for that of the tame steer. 
** My friend,” said I, “ the fault 
lies not in the buffalo, but in the 
steer: what you term a fault in the 
former is really an advantage on 
its side.” Till this moment, the 
man had laboured under one of those 
clouds of prejudice bul too common 
among farmers. He had taken the 
' ox of his father’s farm, as the unit 
whence all his calculations were to 
be made,and his conclusions drawn: 
it was his unchangeable standard of 
excellence, whether applied to the 
plough or to the draught. Nosooner 
was my observation uttered, than 
conviction flashed on his mind. He 
acknowledged the superiority of the 
buffalo. ~ 
But there is another property in 
which the buffalo far surpasses the 
ox:—his strength. Judging from 
the extraordinary size of his bones, 
and the depth and formation of his 
chest, I should not think it unreason- 
able to assign nearly a double portion 
of strength to this powerful inhabi- 
tant of the forest. Reclaim him, and 
you gain a capital quadruped for 
the draught and for the plough: his 
activity peculiarly fits him for the 
latter, in preference to the ox, 
Account of the River Tigris; from 
Ouseley’s Persian Miscellanies. 
MONG his other fitles, the 
Persian emperor styled himself, 
[75 
lord of the four rivers of Paradise, 
which an ingenious traveller* exe 
plains by ‘* Iuphrates, Tigris, 
Araxes, and Indus;” although in 
another place, he acknowledges his 
uncertainty, whether these were the 
streams that watered that happy: 
garden; that the Euphrates and 
Tigris were the principal rivers of 
the terrestial Paradise, is allowed by 
all writers. The Jihoon, or Oxus, 
as we have just seen, is supposed by 
some to have its source there, but as 
to the river Shihoon, as written in 
the specimen, I must confess my 
ignorance. I cannot affirm that it 
means the Araxes, which rises in 
Armenia, to the west of the Caspian 
sea; and 1 should rather imagine 
that the points over the first letters 
were superfluous, and that it signifies 
the Shihoon, or ancient Jaxartes, 
between which, and the lower part 
of the courses of the Jihoon, or 
Oxus, lies that country . called 
‘lransoxania formerly, and by the 
modern Asiatics, Mawer®-ul Neher, 
‘¢ the land beyond the river.” - 
But so little has been done on the 
geography of those countries, and so 
ignorant are we still of the exact 
situation of the rivers which we 
speak of, that a most learned writer 
takes particular occasion to remark 
the peculiar obscurity which yet 
hangs about them; and even the 
celebrated orientalist, M. D’Her- 
belot, only tells us, that perhaps 
(‘6 peut étre”) the Shihoon is only 
another name for that river, which 
the ‘‘ Antients called Jaxartes, and 
the Arabs write Sihoon.” 
Of the river Tigris, so celebrated 
by the Greek and Latin writers, 
the ancient name is no longer used, 
and it is now called Dejleh ; the 
* Sir Thomas Werbert. 
etymology 
