ORIGIN OF DOMESTICATED ANIMALS 223 
Asia. Africa also possesses several distinct species of true 
buffalo, notably the cape buffalo of the south, — with horns much 
like those of the musk ox, -— the Sierra Leone buffalo, and the 
small red or short-horned species of the western coast region. 
In extinct forms of large size Africa is peculiarly rich. If 
accounts may be believed, the horn cores of one specimen from 
Algeria measured no less than eleven feet and another from the 
cape fourteen feet. As they would be considerably larger when 
covered with their horny sheath, the spread of the horns and 
the size of these animals must have been truly prodigious. 
Fic. 42. Sir Donald, head of the largest herd of bisons in America 
Canadian National Park, Banff, Alberta 
It will be seen, therefore, that the domesticated cattle of both 
Asia and Africa have no lack of wild relatives both living and 
extinct, and the fact of their ultimate origin in the wild must be 
clear to the most casual student, —so clear that if the domes- 
ticated races should suddenly become extinct, they, or equally 
good successors, could be readily restored from the wild. 
However this may be in the western continent, all closely 
related species were extinct in America, if, indeed, they ever 
existed, long before its discovery by the white man. The bison 
(Bos americanus), popularly but erroneously called the buffalo, 
a close relative of the European bison (Los bonassus), was the 
