268 



CASSELL'S POPULAR NATURAL HISTORY. 



"In the same deposits and localities which have yielded remains of the aurochs (bison priscus) 

 there have l>een found the remains of another bovine animal, its equal or superior in size, but differing 

 from the aurochs, precisely as the Koruau poets and historians have indicated, by the length of their 

 horns. 



"The persistent bony supports, or cores, of the horns, likewise demonstrate, by their place of 

 origin and curvature, the sub- generic distinction of the great urns from the bison, and its nearer 

 affinity to the domestic ox ; whence we may infer that it resembled the ox in the close nature of its 

 hairy covering, which would make the shaggy coat and the mane of the aurochs more remarkable by 

 comparison. It is much to be regretted, for the interests of zoology, that the great Hercynian uri 

 have been less favoured than their contemporaries, bisontes jubali, in the progress of human civilisation, 

 and that no individuals now remain for study and comparison like the aurochs of Lithuania. 



" My esteemed friend, Professor Bell, who has written the ' History of Existing British Quadru- 

 peds,' is disposed to believe, witli Cuvier, and most other naturalists, that our domestic cattle are the 



THE DURHAM COW. 



degenerated descendants of the great urus. But it seems to me more probable that the herds of the 

 newly-conquered regions would be derived from the already domesticated cattle of the Roman colonists, 

 of those 'boves nostri,' for example, by comparison with which Csesar endeavoured to convey to his 

 countrymen an idea of the stupendous and formidable uri of the Hercynian forests. The taming of 

 such a species would be a much more difficult and also certain mode of supplying the exigencies of the 

 agriculturist than the importation of the breeds of oxen already domesticated and in use by the 

 founders of the new colonies. And that the latter was the chief, if not the sole, source of the ox in 

 England, when its soil began to be cultivated under the Roman sway, is strongly indicated by the 

 analogy of modern colonies. The domestic cattle, for example, of the Anglo- Americans have not been 

 derived from tame descendants of the original wild cattle of North America; there, on the contrary, 

 the bison is fast disappearing before the advance of the agricultural settlers, just as the aurochs, and 

 its contemporary, the urus, have given May before a similar progress in Europe. 



"With regard to the great urus, I believe that this progress has caused its utter extirpation, and 

 that our knowledge of it is now limited to deductions from its fossil or semi-fossil remains." 



Cattle, like sheep, were long produced according to the generosity of the laud on which their lot 

 happened to ! ca,st. It may have been owing to the difficulties of internal communication that very 

 distinct races maintained in some districts of small extent, as compared to the surface of Great Britain, 



