PRIMITIVE EUROPEAN OXEN 
hold three quarts; and other examples and records show that 
these horns sometimes exceeded six feet in length. Old bulls 
were black, but there is reason to suspect that the cows and 
calves may have been red. This great animal roamed through- 
out Europe and western Asia, and was counted among the 
fiercest of game in Cesar’s time, who found it called ur or 
AN OX OF THE WHITE BRITISH PARK CATTLE, 
auerochs; the former word was Latinized as urus, and the 
latter, when this ox had disappeared, became transferred to the 
bison. Even in Roman times the wild ox was growing scarce, 
and it died out early in the seventeenth century. Meanwhile, 
from prehistoric days, calves had been tamed by the peasantry, 
and such cattle as Europe and the Mediterranean basin gener- 
ally possessed were until quite recently little better than rough 
descendants of this captured stock. 
The so-called ‘wild white cattle” preserved in various British parks, 
and often described 25 are, according to Lydekker,® albino descendants of 
the tamed native black aurochs stock, of unknown antiquity, and are kept 
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