222 DOMESTICATED ANIMALS AND PLANTS 



keenest scent. He can be domesticated and is employed as a 

 beast of burden, but if unused for a little time, he becomes 

 extremely wild and likely to escape on opportunity. In any 

 event he steadily refuses to eat corn, confining himself to the 

 hard and scanty grasses of his native plateaus. 



Asia affords still one more relative of the cattle kind, though 

 a little more distant than these just enumerated. This is the 

 wild buffalo {Bos bubiihts), the race to which the term " buffalo " 

 properly belongs.^ These curious animals are about the size of 

 the largest of our common cattle, of a dun or mouse color, nearly 

 destitute of hair, with long, flattened, and corrugated horns curv- 

 ing backward rather than forward, as in most of the cattle kind. 

 The wild buffaloes are domesticated in both India and Burma, 

 where they are highly esteemed for their milk, and where they 

 are indispensable for labor in the rice fields and other lowlands ^ 

 (see Fig. 39). 



Their love for water is proverbial, and whether domesticated 

 or wild the heat of the day will generally find them comfortably 

 submerged in any accessible water, with only the nostrils stick- 

 ing out. Nothing can restrain them from seeking this protection 

 against heat and insects in the middle of the day, and if the 

 farmer is slow in detaching the plow or wagon, it makes very 

 little difference with the buffalo after he is fairly headed for the 

 stream or the pool. The buffalo is wild on the plains of the 

 Ganges, the Brahmaputra, and along the foot of the Himalayas, 

 besides having become feral in the forests of Burma and other 

 regions in southeastern Asia. 



Besides these Asiatic species, closely related to our domestic 

 cattle, we have the Galla ox, a humped race native to Africa and 

 considered by Riitimeyer as closely related to the banteng of 



1 The term is popularly but erroneously applied to the American bison, 

 which is structurally as far removed from the true buffalo as are our common 

 cattle. 



2 These useful animals have also made their way as domesticated beasts of 

 labor over considerable portions of Asia Minor, Egypt, and Italy, and may be 

 seen in most of our shows and zoological gardens of this country and Europe. 



