84 NATURAL HISTORY ESSAYS 



can hardly be satisfactory to the naturalist, being 

 neither one thing nor the other, yet by this introduction 

 of fresh blood it would doubtless be possible to 

 preserve indefinitely a feral race of bovines bearing 

 at least some outward resemblance to the monarch 

 of the prairies. The supposed antagonism of the 

 European bison to domestic cattle has been proved 

 false by Count Walicki, who crossed his bonasus 

 with Swiss cows ; while the pair of calves received at 

 the Zoological Gardens in 1847 took readily to the 

 foster-mothers provided for them. It might therefore 

 be possible to establish a race of half-bred or three- 

 quarter-bred bonasus ; but experiments in this 

 direction would be far inferior to the plan of strictly 

 protecting it as a pure-bred, truly wild animal. 



Happily, the shooting of bison has been absolutely 

 prohibited throughout the Russian Empire, so that 

 even a grand duke has to get permission to kill one 

 or two ; in addition, the Kisha district of the 

 Caucasus is now strictly preserved by the Grand 

 Duke Sergius Mikhailvitch, who has rented 500,000 

 acres of the bison country, and checkmates poaching 

 by a staff of good keepers. It is said that in 

 ten years the Grand Duke's party only killed 

 one Caucasian bison. The present species was 

 probably the first animal to receive Government 

 protection save, perhaps, the New Forest deer at 

 the time of the Conquest hence, possibly, the fact 

 that it now survives at all. 



