Mr. E. Bljtli on the supposititious " Bos (?) pegasus." 20/) 



always straight. When they see human beings they do not 

 flee, but stand and look on.' Lopes describes them as some- 

 thing less than an ox, but similar in head and neck. Dapper re- 

 ports them to be buffaloes, of a reddish colour, with long horns." 



Of all names, the appellation " buffalo " is about the most 

 vaguely applied by unscientific writers. In general, as in 

 North America, it refers to any second animal of the bovine 

 group which is not the ordinary ox of the locality. When 

 English graziers talk of " buffaloes," they are sure to mean 

 the humped taurine cattle ; and the latter are referred to by 

 that name in Low's ^ Domestic Quadrupeds of the British 

 Islands,' as being kept in certain English parks. The real 

 buffaloes have come to be denominated "water-buffaloes;" 

 but in South Africa there is a genuine buffalo {Buhalus caffer) , 

 which, as the single bovine species there inhabiting which is 

 additional to the domestic ox, has chanced to be rightly so 

 designated. Capt. Lyon, R.N., in his ' Travels in North 

 Africa,' describes what he styles three species of " buffalo," 

 which prove to be the Barbary Aoudad {Ovis lervia)^ the large 

 North -African Bubalis [Alcelajylms major ^ from its alleged 

 size), and the Barbary Leucoryx ( Oryx leucoryx). Wherefore 

 it follows that no definite idea can be attached to the name 

 " buffalo " when employed by writers who are not carefully 

 discriminative zoologists. 



Next, Lopes describes the animal to which he refers as being 

 " something less than an ox." We have heard of a wit- 

 ness in an English court of justice describing a particular stone, 

 respecting the magnitude of which he was requested to give 

 his testimony, as being " of the size of a piece of chalk ! " 

 Hardly less vague is the allusion of a traveller in intertropical 

 Africa to the stature of an ox, inasmuch as there are races of 

 taurine cattle in that part of the world which are of all sizes, 

 from the very largest to the very smallest. The Pacasses of 

 Congo, noticed by Fathers Gallini and Carli, " with ears half 

 a yard in length," I should have felt inclined to refer to a 

 species of Hip>potragus formerly in the Knowsley menagerie 

 (a young animal, of which I have seen an unpublished co- 

 loured drawing), only that it is stated that their horns are 

 " always straight." By no means improbably a straight- 

 homed species of Hipprotragiis (?), except that their " roaring 

 like lions " is somewhat anomalous for a member of the Oryx 

 group (to which theHippotragi a,ve unquestionably subordinate, 

 or vice versd). The Hippotragi, it may be remarked, repre- 

 sent the horses, as the Oryges do the zebras and asses, among 

 the grand antilopine series ! The tendency to inordinate de- 

 velopment of the ear-conch is remarkable in sundry West- 



