268 On the 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. i. 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 inconceivable how any one will reject so many 

 concordant testimonies, and from such widely different places 

 and times, that during the historical period there lived in 

 Europe an enormously large 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 in a land far distant from us. 

 Among 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 Zehu ; others have long horns bent in diflPerent directions, 

 and seem already to be tame descendants from the Urus. They 

 show a species of small growth, and have the horn-cores {steglar) 

 outward, upward, and bent in one direction. It appears to me 

 probable that the colossal smooth-foreheaded Uims 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 Jotens (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 Csesar^s time ; but in the 



