778 THE UNGULATES, OR HOOFED MAMMALS 



in large patches, thus showing the nearly bare skin clothed with short mouse-colored 

 hair. Both the European and the American bison are very closely allied, and we 

 shall reserve our notice of their distinctive differences till we come to the second of 

 the two species. Owing to a confusion of terms, the name aurochs, which properly 

 belongs to the extinct wild ox of Europe, has been very generally applied to the 

 European or true bison, but it may be hoped that this misapplication will soon be a 

 thing of the past. 



The European bison is a forest-dwelling animal, having been always 

 absent from the open plains of Southern Russia, which in many re- 

 spects resembles the habitat of its North- American cousin. Formerly this species, 

 as attested both by historical documents and by its semifossilized remains, was 

 abundant over a large area of Europe, but it is now restricted to the forests of Bial- 

 owitza in Lithuania, to the Caucasus, and, it is said, to portions of Moldavia and 

 Wallachia: Fossil remains of the bison are met with in the caverns and superficial 

 deposits of England, France, Switzerland, Germany, and Italy; the earliest deposits 

 in which they occur being the brick earths of the Thames valley, where they are as- 

 sociated with those of the mammoth, and in the still older " forest bed " of the Nor- 

 folk coast. The fossil race was, indeed, of larger dimensions, and had longer and 

 rather straighter horns than its existing representative; but these differences cannot 

 well be regarded as of specific importance. From Britain the bison disappeared at a 

 much earlier date than the aurochs, none of its remains occurring in the fens and 

 turbaries, where those of the latter are so common. Northward the range of the bi- 

 son formerly extended into Siberia; while its remains have also been obtained from 

 the frozen soil of Eschscholtz bay in Alaska. 



The bison now living in Lithuania are specially -protected by the Rus- 

 sian Government and are under the charge of a staff of keepers, but 

 those of the Caucasus are thoroughly wild. Although living at a greater altitude, and 

 thus exposed to a more intense cold, the bison of the Caucasus are less thickly haired 

 than are those of Lithuania. Bison were abundant in the Black Forest in the 

 time of Julius Caesar, and as late as the ninth and tenth centuries were sufficiently 

 numerous in parts of Switzerland and Germany to be used as food. In a recent sum- 

 mary of the history of the species, Mr. F. A. Lucas states that "up to 1500 the 

 European bison seems to have been common in Poland, where it was looked upon as 

 royal game, and hunted in right royal manner by the king and nobility, as many as 

 two thousand or three thousand beaters being employed to drive the game. In 1534 

 the animal was still so numerous in the vicinity of Girgau, Transylvania, that peas- 

 ants passing through the woods were occasionally trampled to death by startled bi- 

 son, and hunts were undertaken by the nobles in order to reduce the number of the 

 animals. In spite of this local abundance, it is probable that about this time the 

 bison was in a great measure restricted to Lithuania; and although so late as 1555 

 one was killed in Prussia, it is almost certain that this was merely a straggler from 

 the main herd. In 1752 a grand hunt was organized by the Polish king, Augustus 

 III., and in one day 60 bison were killed. . . . For some time after the above event 

 little seems to have been recorded concerning the zubr, so that Desmarest, writing 

 in 1822, says that if any remain in Lithuania they must be very few in number. 



