490 



BISON. 



vei v wide one, unless the time allowed for the change 

 is great, the animal cannot make what we call a volun- 

 tary effort to pass the limit ; it cannot anticipate by 

 reasoning what is to take place, and meet it by expe- 

 dient, as man does. Thus when the circumstances 

 of the locality in which it was at first native and at 

 home, as it were, change either more extensively or 

 more rapidly than the power of its nature to yield to 

 circumstances can bear, the animal can subsist no 

 longer, and so becomes extinct ; and the only memo- 

 lial of it that is left is its bones, in the debris and 

 rubbish, or the impressions of them in the more con- 

 solidated strata. 



It is to the mammalia chiefly, among vertebrated 

 animals, that these observations apply ; and therefore 

 it is chiefly their bones which are found in the appa- 

 rently more recent deposits. We do not find the 

 bones of birds, because they can gradually retire as 

 the changes occur, or take to the wing and escape 

 from more hasty contingencies. 



The judgment of the future which man is enabled 

 to make from the experience of the past serves him 

 even in better stead than the wings and power of 

 aerial motion do the bird ; and therefore, though 

 there are accumulations of human bones, the result 

 sometimes of sudden natural catastrophes, but much 

 more frequently of the wars of mankind with each 

 other, we never rind the remains of an extinct nation 

 preserved in the soil, as we do those of various species 

 of mammalia, some of which have perished from 

 those regions in which their bones are found, and 

 others altogether from the face of the earth as living 

 creatures. 



But the power which the use of experience and 

 reason gives man, both of enduring differences of 

 climate, which no other animal can endure, and of 

 maintaining his possession during changes which no 

 other animal can undergo, is of itself perfectly capable 

 of enabling the circumstances of climate and time to 

 have produced in him, out of one, all the varieties 

 which we now find out of one original race one 

 original pair. With this resource, man might see 

 race after race perishing around him, and the charac- 

 ter of the country and the successive generations of 

 men' so changing with the lapse of long periods of 

 time, that were it possible for the men of remote 

 antiquity to visit the places of their former habitation, 

 they would not know their former abode, and would 

 reject their lineal descendants as a new and a strange 

 people. This almost unlimited power in man to ac- 

 commodate himself to the differences of climate and 

 situation, if they come on him with sufficient slow- 

 ness for enabling him to make use of the resources of 

 his reason, release him from that bondage to climate 

 which attaches to all the mammalia which have not 

 the power of migration with the seasons. There is 

 thus no natural necessity for a separate typical man 

 of each different climate, as there is for a typical spe- 

 cies of the mammalia where the genus is generally 

 distributed, and the individuals incapable of migra- 

 tion ; for if man moves slowly enough towards any 

 climate, and takes the due precaution, he can be just 

 as much the man peculiarly adapted for any one cli- 

 mate as for any other. 



Those mammalia which man has long held in a 

 state of domestication hold, in respect of this adapta- 

 tion to climate, a sort of intermediate place between 

 man and the species, even of the same genus, which 

 are left to the contingencies of circumstances in free 



nature. The domesticated animal partakes in the 

 protecting contrivances of his master, and therefore 

 is enabled to live and become more and more adapted 

 to the climate in each succeeding generation. So 

 much is this the case that in climates which are much 

 inferior to those out of which the animals are origi- 

 nally brought, no small part of the cultivator's art 

 consists in preventing too much accommodation to 

 the climate. 



These circumstances bring us very naturally both 

 to the original characters and the progressive history 

 of the bisons. They are naturally the arctic tribe of 

 the genus bos; and unless it be about die longitude 

 of the Himalaya Mountains, where not only the chain 

 of being but almost the very same race appears to 

 extend from Siberia to India, the bisons appear to 

 have been in all ages inhabitants of the northern lati- 

 tudes only. There is no vestige of them in South 

 America, where ruminantia appear never to have 

 existed as inhabitants of the plains ; there is no 

 vestige of them in Australia, and so far as is known 

 there are no ruminantia there ; there is no vestige of 

 them in Africa, though ruminant animals of other 

 genera, and of the more tropical groups of the same 

 genus, are by no means rare ; and the species of 

 Southern Asia, which have been referred to the 

 group, are of somewhat doubtful admission into it, or 

 if they are of the same stock they are wonderfully 

 altered by climate, for animals which have never 

 been in a state of domestication, and thus have de- 

 rived no assistance from the protecting care of man. 



As natives of less fertile and more inhospitable 

 places than the rest of the genus, the bisons are en- 

 dowed with greater courage, proportional strength, 

 and relative power of locomotion. They have a 

 daring and even a ferocious aspect ; and they are as 

 savage as they look. The beasts of prey can take or 

 master them only by stratagem ; and the wild hunters 

 of the places in which they arc still to be met with, 

 who are equally bold and skilful in the hunting of 

 animals, as they depend chiefly on them for their 

 food, consider the bisons as their most dangerous 

 game. 



In consequence of this boldness and ferocity of 

 character, the bison has never been domesticated, but 

 left to the contingencies of wild nature, and those 

 changes which its haunts have in the lapse of ages 

 undergone, without any advantage from the arts of 

 man ; but rather the reverse, as both his personal 

 safety and that desire of fame by conquering powerful 

 animals which is so characteristic of man in a state of 

 sernibarbarism, by what name soever that state may 

 be called, have induced him to thin, by every act in 

 his power, the numbers of those animals. 



And here, contrary to what we would expect on a 

 first and superficial view of the subject, the course of 

 natural circumstances co-operates with this disposition 

 in man. The most powerful and formidable animal, 

 the one which we would have imagined to be so 

 sinewed and so spirited that it could overcome all con- 

 tingencies and hold its ground against time itself, is 

 the very first to give way. The northern elephant 

 was, in all probability, the most powerful animal that 

 tenanted the arctic lands ; and of it there are no 

 memorials save its bones in the accumulations of 

 rubbish, or a few specimens preserved in the ice, just 

 to let the curious know what a giant creature it had 

 been. The same is the case with the giant bear and 

 the giant stag ; and while there arc bones of bisons 



