282 CASUALS IN THE CAUCASUS 



forests in great herds, the bison whose numbers are 

 thinned now to twos and threes. Before the ever- 

 advancing zone of a civiHzation too oppressive for the 

 great creatures to hve beside, although not particularly 

 noticeable to anyone else, they have left their old-time 

 haunts and passed into the little-known western wilder- 

 ness beyond the Zellentchuk and Laba valleys. There, 

 where the footsteps of man rarely tread, the last 

 remaining specimens, saving the protected herd in 

 Lithuania, of the European bison living wild, exist, and 

 nobody can tell us with any exactitude how many 

 remain. The numbers all told certainly do not exceed 

 three hundred, and probably aggregate many less. 

 The shooting of them is entirely forbidden, and a special 

 ukase from the Tsar himself is necessary before a 

 sportsman can take the field. 



So many people persistently term the bison {Bos 

 bonasus) of Europe, " Aurochs." The word is a com- 

 plete misnomer, for the true aurochs, or wild cattle, 

 once to be found in vast numbers all over Europe, 

 and from whose stock our own domestic cattle sprung, 

 became extinct in the seventeenth century. In 

 Caesar's time, the Ur, or Auerochs, roamer of Europe 

 and Western Asia, was classed among the fiercest of 

 wild animals. 



Dr. J. A. Allen, in his monograph on The American 

 Bison, says that bison is an English corruption of 

 Wiscnt, which is the proper German name of " the 

 big, humped, shaggy-browed oxen which people came 

 carelessly to call ' aurochs ' long after the true aurochs 

 had disappeared." 



