268 On tiie extinct and existing Bovine Animals of Scandinavia. 
This figure I look upon as genuine, and the best now to be 
found of the Urus in a wild state. The figure which Gesner (in 
his History of Animals, Francof. 1622, lib. 1. p. 145) gives of 
the Urus or Polish Thur is inferior to the former, yet in all 
essential points they perfectly agree; the direction of the horns, 
the long curly hair on the forehead, the short hairy covering of the 
remaining parts, the length of the tail, &c., are in both the same. 
Gesner assures us, after Wolfgang Lazius, that the communicated 
figures of that and of the Bison are made from living animals, 
through the care of Baron Herberstain ; and in the text he says : 
“Urus. . . est forma bovis nigri, habet longiora cornua quam 
bisons.” 
It is almost inconceiyable how any one will reject so many 
concordant testimonies, and from such widely different places 
and times, that during the historical period there lived im 
Europe an enormously “anes ox, of the form of the tame ox, of 
a black colour and long spreading horns, quite dissimilar from 
the Bison. This denial is so much the more unreasonable, as the 
bones of just such an ox as described by the ancients have been 
found in the earth, and they have also been found in the same 
places with the bones of the Bison. 
That this Wild Ox has contributed to produce the race of our 
large, long-horned cattle, is more than probable. 
When and where this colossal, flat-foreheaded, large- horned 
Wild Ox first became tamed, we do not know; but certainly it 
took place in remote antiquity and im a land far distant from us. 
mong the copies taken from fresco paintings on the sepulchres 
at Thebes, preserved in the Egyptian room of the British Museum, 
are to be seen groups of cattle, among which we distinguish some 
as the Zebu ; others have long horns “bent in different “directions, 
and seem already to be tame descendants from the Urus. They 
show a species of small growth, and have the horn-cores (s/eg/ar) 
outward, upward, and bent in one direction. It appears to me 
probable that the colossal smooth-foreheaded Urus was first 
tamed either in the south or south-west part of Europe, or 
already in Asia by some Celtic race ; but, nevertheless, long after 
this it was often found in a wild or half-wild state in the forests 
of central Europe, even till the beginning or middle of the 
sixteenth century; that the tame race which sprung therefrom, 
perhaps like all tame races, became gradually smaller than the 
wild stocks, but yet larger than other tame races which spring 
from smaller stocks; and it was this large breed of black cattle 
which the Celtic races brought with them here to the north, and 
which are spoken of in many passages of our Sagas as belonging 
to the Jétens (giants). The tame race which sprang from the 
Urus has reached us from the south and west of Europe. It 
was found probably in Italy already in Ceesar’s time ; but in the 
