222 DOMESTICATED ANIMALS AND PLANTS 
keenest scent. He can be domesticated and is employed as a 
beast of burden, but if unused for a little time, he becomes 
extremely wild and likely to escape on opportunity. In any 
event he steadily refuses to eat corn, confining himself to the 
hard and scanty grasses of his native plateaus. 
Asia affords still one more relative of the cattle kind, though 
a little more distant than these just enumerated. This is the 
wild buffalo (Bos dubulus), the race to which the term “ buffalo” 
properly belongs.!. These curious animals are about the size of 
the largest of our common cattle, of a dun or mouse color, nearly 
destitute of hair, with long, flattened, and corrugated horns curv- 
ing backward rather than forward, as in most of the cattle kind. 
The wild buffaloes are domesticated in both India and Burma, 
where they are highly esteemed for their milk, and where they 
are indispensable for labor in the rice fields and other lowlands 2 
(see Fig. 39). . 
Their love for water is proverbial, and whether domesticated 
or wild the heat of the day will generally find them comfortably 
submerged in any accessible water, with only the nostrils stick- 
ing out. Nothing can restrain them from seeking this protection 
against heat and insects in the middle of the day, and if the 
farmer is slow in detaching the plow or wagon, it makes very 
little difference with the buffalo after he is fairly headed for the 
stream or the pool. The buffalo is wild on the plains of the 
Ganges, the Brahmaputra, and along the foot of the Himalayas, 
besides having become feral in the forests of Burma and other 
regions in southeastern Asia. 
Besides these Asiatic species, closely related to our domestic 
cattle, we have the Galla ox, a humped race native to Africa and 
considered by Riitimeyer as closely related to the banteng of 
1 The term is popularly but erroneously applied to the .\merican bison, 
which is structurally as far removed from the true buffalo as are our common 
cattle. 
2 These useful animals have also made their way as domesticated beasts of 
labor over considerable portions of Asia Minor, Egypt, and Italy, and may be 
seen in most of our shows and zodlogical gardens of this country and Europe. 
