54 STEPPES AND DESERTS. 



their former long continued connection. The Mexicans 

 call the European ox in the Aztec dialect " quaquahue," a 

 horned animal, from quaquahuitl, a horn. Some very large 

 horns of cattle found in the ancient Mexican buildings not 

 far from Cuernavaca, to the south-west of the city of Mexico, 

 appear to me to have belonged to the musk ox. The Cana- 

 dian bison can be tamed to agricultural labour. It breeds 

 with the European cattle, but it was long uncertain whether 

 the hybrid was fruitful. Albert Gallatin, who, before he 

 appeared in Europe as a distinguished diplomatist, had 

 obtained by personal inspection great knowledge of the un- 

 cultivated parts of the United States, assures us that " the 

 mixed breed was quite common fifty years ago in some of 

 the north-western counties of Yirginia ; and the cows, the 

 issue of that mixture, propagated like all others/' " I do 

 not remember," he adds, " the grown bison being tamed, 

 but sometimes young bison calves were caught by dogs, and 

 were brought up and driven out with the European cows." 

 At Monongahela all the cattle were for a long time of this 

 mixed breed : but complaints were made that they gave very 

 little milk. The favourite food of the bison or buffalo is 

 Tripsacum dactyloides (called buffalo grass in North Caro- 

 lina), and an undescribed species of clover nearly allied to 

 Trifolium repens, and designated by Barton as Trifolium 

 bisonicum. 



I have already called attention elsewhere (Cosmos, vol. ii. 

 note 455, English ed.) to the circumstance that, according 

 to a statement of the trustworthy Gomara, (Historia General 

 de las Indias, cap. 214) there was still living in the six- 



