External Characters of Ruminant Artiodactyla. 109 
ever that may be, it may be claimed that the coloration of 
zebus and European cattle affords no support to the view 
that they belong to distinct species. 
Votce.—Blyth and those who have copied him attach great 
importance to the voice asa criterion of distinct specific origin 
between B. indicus and B. taurus. He and Blanford 
described the voice of the former as a grunt utterly unlike 
the “lowing ” or bellowing of Kuropean domesticated cattle. 
This is only half the truth. Zebus, on the whole, are silent 
animals, but now and again they utter an abbreviated or 
prolonged grunt recalling that of a yak or American bison. 
But they also call with a loud voice which may be perhaps 
described as somewhat intermediate between the “ moo’? of 
an ordinary cow and the hoarse “baa” of a sheep. The 
sound is distinguishable from that of a cow or bull of British 
cattle, but I have heard a zebu calf, fretting for its mother, 
call her with a voice very like that of an English “ shorthorn” 
calf. 
The voice is certainly a criterion of kinship in wild 
animals ; but to what extent it is to be trusted in domesticated 
forms appears to me to be doubtful. It is admitted, I take it, 
that domesticated fowls are the unmixed descendants of the 
Bankiva jungle-fowl (Gallus gallus). Nevertheless, the crow 
of the latter is generally, within my experience, distinguish- 
able from that of the former, though unmistakably like it: 
and different breeds of domesticated fowls often differ to a 
certain extent in voice, thus attesting the variability, though 
limited, of this character. Domesticated dogs, too, differ 
from wolves in having added the bark to the howling voice 
common to both ; yet the wolf or the jackal—it matters not 
which in the present connection—is usually accepted as the 
the living forms and are those whose horns come nearest in shape to 
those of gnus. This author’s reliance on the shapes of horns as tests of 
affinity led him into few more unintelligible errors than this, excepting 
only his employment of the curvature of the horns, a manifestly useless 
character for the purpose, as a basis for the classification of the Bovidee 
in his ‘ Catalogue of Ungulates.’ With all respect to Prof. Lonnberg, I 
am quite sure that his opinion about Connochetes and Bos is unsound. 
The anatomical evidence that gnus are specialized hartebeests (Lubalis) 
and that the cattle are specialized Tragelaphines appears to me to be con- 
clusive. The view that close affinity between the Bovines and Tragela- 
phines, attested more particularly by the Anoa, the primitive Asiatic 
buffalo, is quite in keeping with Lydekker’s above-quoted statement that 
the earliest representatives of the ox-tribe are related to the buffaloes, 
which in some respects are the most primitive of living forms of Boyinz. 
