248 JOURNAL, BOMBAY NATURAL BISTORT SOCLETY, 1892. 



river, and there is not a scintilla of evidence to bring it near either 

 Peshawar or Bannu. Up to the present, at any rate, all that is 

 before us about the Trans-Indus Rhinoceros is a lot of careless 

 quotations, probably at second hand, from an obviously bad transla- 

 tion of a probably corrupt manuscript. 



After the Rhinoceroses, in Mr. Blanford's classification, come the 

 Tapirs, which are not in our province. Only this writer would 

 like to know where and when a Tapir was called a ^'Danta'' ? 

 There is some reason for thinking it an American word, but 

 it occurs in the Oommentaries (so called) of the great Alfonso 

 D'Albuquerque, as the name of some Malayan animal apparently 

 resembling a Tapir, and any light on the subject would be welcome. 



After the Tapirs, our author puts the genus Bos. We have only 

 one species wild — the bison, lately and sufficiently discussed in 

 these pages by Mr. Inverarity. 



The Sheep and Goats come nest in order, and we have only one 

 of each, both confined to the Sind hills. Our goat or Ibex, 

 Capra cegagrus, is interesting as the widest ranger of all wild goats, 

 found from Crete to Sind, and probably the ancestor of most tame 

 goats. The '* Field " newspaper has lately published a perfect 

 little monograph on the wild goats of the world, which has probably 

 come within ken of most of our readers. 



Our sheep, the " Gad " of the Sindis, was until now Ovis cyclo- 

 ceros, but Mr. Blanford identifies it with Ovis vign&i of more 

 northern lands. 



On the whole, it too has very good claims to the honour of having 

 begotten at least part of the tame sheep of the world, Otherwise it 

 is not a " first sort buckrie," except in the item of mutton. 



After all, a sheep which produces good mutton justifies its 

 existence. 



We regret to say that at this point Mr. Blanford's second volume 

 begins to fall off. The next two names are ^' Cemas goral " and 

 " Boselaphus tragocamelus," of which the first is a misspelling, and 

 the second a mere barbarism. The man who rejected '' tihetanus" 

 and ^' philippefisis " because they were not true, might fairly have 

 been expected to reject such outrages on philology, as neither Greek 

 nor Latin. 



