412 CLASS MAMMALIA. 



merce, leisure, and learning ; he was no less the means of 

 abstracting mankind from the necessity of shedding blood, 

 and thus he became the emblem of justice, the vehicle of 

 Siva. This merited consideration we see dexterously used 

 by ancient legislators to soften the brutality of human 

 manners, either by forbidding the flesh as food in those 

 countries where his acknowledged utility was counteracted 

 by obstacles in the increase, or by commanding the frequent 

 use of sacrifices by a proper slaughter, and where fire and salt 

 should be employed, to check a horrid species of massacre 

 and practice of devouring the flesh in a raw state. Such 

 are the meaning of the prohibitions in Deuteronomy ; and 

 the necessity of these prohibitions is but too manifest in the 

 ancient allusions of Orpheus which inculcate that principle, 

 when we find Julius Firmicus, many ages after, reproach- 

 ing the civilized Greeks with perpetrating these horrid 

 repasts in their Dionisiacs : " Vivum laniant dentibus 

 taufum ;" and again, " Alter, cruentus ore, dum viva pe- 

 coris membra discerpit ;" which evidently mean the brutal 

 repast still practised in Abyssinia, for which the veracity 

 of Bruce was so vehemently impugned by ignorant philan- 

 thropists and wits. 



The' words Thur, Tur, Toor, Tier, Deer, Stier, Steer in 

 the northern dialects of Europe, in their early and in their 

 latest acceptations, are direct names of well known rumi- 

 nants ; but in proportion as we pursue the root towards its 

 origin in Central Asia, we find that the parent language 

 of the Gothic and Sclavonian, as well as of the Hellenic 

 and others, unite in fixing it upon a large bovine animal, 

 perfectly applicable to that known in Casar's Commentaries 

 by the name of Urus, implying primaeval, ancient, silvan, 

 fierce, mysterious ; still retained in the Teutonic ur and its 

 numerous adjuncts. We there find the root of the denomi- 

 nation of several regions in which the parent race of the 

 Tauri, or the Urus, has existed, or still resides. Thus 



