II 



CONCERNING THE COW HEESELF 



There is somewhere a story about a painting in 

 which the menagerie is represented as trooping up 

 the gang-plank into the ark in orderly array, ac- 

 companied by Noah himself, carefully bearing a 

 tin box inscribed, "Papers relating to the origin 

 of the DeLevis family." Very much the same sort 

 of loving service has been rendered by the natural- 

 ist to the cow. The geologists have patiently dug 

 the million-year-old skeletons of her forebears out 

 of the earth and have christened them with long 

 hard names, and the zoologists have taken their 

 present-day and extinct representatives and have 

 referred them to one or to several species, each 

 man according to his own ideas of the philosophy 

 of classification. We may dip but lightly into zo- 

 ology by saying that all our domestic cattle are of 

 European origin and perhaps the dominant species, 

 Bos taurus, may do for a family name. If we are 

 born zoologists rather than dairymen, we may read 

 books with prints of fossil skeletons and skull 

 measurements and discussions of dentition for- 

 mulae, and may at least have the satisfaction of 



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