Be An SpvOe MN, 
and the many iflands off of that promontory, with the Aleutian or 
New Fox iflands, fomewhat more diftant, ftretching very neat to Ame- 
rica, may with great reafon be fuppofed to be fragments of land 
which joined the two continents, and formed into their infular {tate 
by the mighty convulfion which divided Afia from America. Spain 
was probably thus disjoined from Africa ; Britain from France; Ice- 
land from Greenland; Spitzbergen from Lapland. 
But that they paffed from fa to America is far the more probable, 
than that they ftocked the new world from the fide of Europe, not 
only on account of the prefent narrownefs of the ftreight between the 
two continents, which gives a greater caufe to fuppofe them to have 
been once joined; but that we are now arrived at a certainty, that 
thefe animals in antient days were natives of Sidiria: the {culls, with 
the horns affixed, of a fize far fuperior to any known at this time, have 
been found foffil not only on the banks of the J/ga, which falls into 
the Lena, but even in thofe of the 4nadyr, the moft eaftern of the 
Sibirian rivers, and which difembogues north of Kamt/chatka into thofe 
ftreights: fimilar fkulls and horns have been difcovered near Dir/chau, 
in Poland, alfo of a gigantic magnitude ; and in my opinion of the 
fame fpecies with the modern Bi/ons *. 
In America thefe animals are found in the countries fix hundred 
miles weft of Hudfon’s Bay; this is their moft northern refidence. 
From thence they are met with in great droves as low as Cibole t, in 
lat. 33, a little north of California, and alfo in the province of Mivera, 
in New Mexico t; the {pecies inftantly ceafes fouth of thofe countries. 
They inhabit Canada, to the weft of the lakes; and in greater abun- 
dance in the rich /avannas which border the river Mififipi, and the 
great rivers which fall into it from the weft, in the upper Louifiana §. 
* Nov. Com. Petrop. xvii. 460. tab. xi. xii.—I am forry to diffent from my efteemed 
friend Doétor Pallas, who thinks them to be the horns of Buffaloes; which are longer, 
ftraiter, and angular. 
+ Purchas, iv. 1560, 1566. t Fernandez, Now. Hifp. x. c. 30.—Hernandex, 58. 
§ Du Pratz,ii, 50. 3.116, 286. 
B2 There 
Lp 
AMERICA. 
