HISTORY OF THE BISON. 75 



down to the very shores of the Atlantic, so that it was diffi- 

 cult to imagine a country as being better adapted to its 

 native animals than North America was at that time to its 

 bisons. Even now, notwithstanding the disappearance of 

 these animals from the parts which have been settled and 

 cultivated, the immense herds show that there is no falling 

 off in the fitness of the country in those parts where the 

 animals have not been invaded by civilization. South 

 America, too, which appears never to have had any rumi- 

 nant animals save the lamas and alpacas of the more alpine 

 districts, has proved, by the vast extent to which the cattle 

 introduced by Europeans have multiplied in the plains, to 

 be well suited for these animals, while in the greater part 

 of Europe, and also in many places of Asia, the numbers 

 of these animals in the wild state, have certainly been 

 diminishing, in situations where they cannot be supposed 

 to have vanished before the progress of population and 

 culture. The unavoidable inference is that, in Europe and 

 great part of Asia, seasonal changes have taken place, and 

 that, too, without any geological catastrophe of which we 

 can find a trace, or even a single circumstance which we 

 can imagine so as to render such an occurrence probable, or 

 even possible, to which nothing analogous has taken place 

 in America. The bisons of the two continents are, no 

 doubt, not the same species. But if deviation from the 

 character of the common ox, which has accompanied civili- 

 zation and prospered along with it, is to constitute a species, 

 the peculiar characters of the American bison, as deviating 

 farther from those of that animal, make it of the two the 

 more characteristic of a different state of the country. The 

 field for speculation in progressive natural history, which 

 the consideration of these animals would open up is both 

 wide and curious ; but the data are few, and it comes not 

 within the scope of a popular work in any other way than 

 as a subject to which attention may be profitably directed. 



