814 MODIFICATIONS OF ASPECTS OF ORGANIC NATURE 



memories by these names. The European names for the ox, on the 

 other hand, are said by M. Joly (cit. Isidore St. Hilaire, 'Hist. Nat. 

 Gen.' iii. p. 89) to have an Asiatic origin, and M. A. Pictet (' Des 

 Origines Indo-Europeennes,' pp. 330-343) has declared his views 

 to the same efiPect. This, however, is only what would have been 

 expected in the European languages of the Aryan division. What 

 is of importance as regards the domestication of the ox is to note 

 that, though such languages as the Finnic may use loan words 

 taken from Aryan tongues to express the general idea of Ox 

 ( = Bovine animal), they frequently have true Turanian vocables 

 to denote such particularities as we have in view when we speak of 

 heifers, calves, cows, bulls, and the 'ox,' sensu strictori^ confirming 

 in the last matter the statement of Strabo (vii. 4, 8) that castration 

 was learnt from the eastern Europeans and Sarmatians. There is 

 in fact a good deal of evidence for a view which should hold either 

 that the Turanian races domesticated the wild ox, or rather the 

 wild calf, independently; or that the human species did this great 

 work before the differentiation into Aryan-speaking and Turanian- 

 speaking men was carried out. That the Scythian breed of cattle 

 should have been hornless in the time of Herodotus (iv. 29) appears 

 to me to be explicable, not on the hypothesis taken up by later 

 observers that it is an effect of cold, but as being a result of 

 long-sustained domestication; and if what Hehn, p. 413, 1. c, 

 suggests as to the South Russian breed of small red steppe cattle 

 being descendants of those Scythian oxen is true, we should have a 

 further confirmation of this view furnished in their persistency. 

 There is, at any rate, another breed of cattle in the South Russian 

 steppes, which goes by the name of the ' Kalmuc' cow, and is sup- 

 posed to have accompanied the Mongolian or Tartar hordes in their 

 invasion of Europe. 



Some writers, iu defiance of the arguments that have just been 

 glanced at, and of many others, have advocated the claims of Africa 

 to be considered the parent country of the domestic ox. The main 

 fact, as it seems to me, which has induced or seduced them rather 

 into this conclusion, is the great extent to which boviculture has 

 developed itself through the length and breadth of the 'Dark 

 Continent.' But without wasting words in pointing out the 

 curious conclusions to which this reasoning would lead us in other 

 cases, I would refer such persons to Middendorff's account of the 



