254 THE BISON. 



causes the separation of the mass, and sends them 

 adrift upon the waves. This will also account for 

 the discovery of many fossil remains in places where 

 the animals to which they belonged could not pos- 

 sibly arrive by any other means. 



The musk ox was long mistaken for the Euro- 

 pean Bison, though materially differing in his 

 anatomy. During winter he resides with his 

 companions on the mountains, or in the deep 

 woods of temperate North America; in those espe- 

 cially where the Great White, or Weymouth Pine, 

 the most beautiful of the transatlantic species, forms 

 a striking feature in the forest scenery of Vermont, 

 New Hampshire, and some parts of Canada. This 

 noble tree rises at nearly half its elevation above 

 the summits of the other trees, and like the tropical 

 palms, so beautifully described by St. Pierre and 

 Humboldt, resembles a forest planted upon another 

 forest, where the sighing of the wind in the top- 

 most boughs sounds like the murmur of a distant 

 waterfall, and adds to the solemnity produced by 

 the gloom and silence of those interminable shades. 



Bisons formerly ranged over the vast extent of the 

 North American states. Lawson informs us that, 

 even in his time, some were killed in Virginia; and 

 Gumming relates in his sketches of a tour to the 

 Western country, that long after Kentucky began 

 to be generally settled, and ceased to be an Indian 

 hunting-ground, buffaloes, bears, and deer were so 

 plentiful, that little or no bread was used, and the 

 facility of gaining them prevented the progress of 

 agriculture, until the poor innocent buffaloes were 

 extirpated, and other wild animals much thinned. 



