304 MOSTLY MAMMALS 
a ring fence than many islands of less than half its 
acreage, and this may really bring it, so far as the de- 
velopment of animal life is concerned, into the same 
category as a small island. 
Be this as it may, Celebes has the distinction of being 
the home of the smallest living representative of the wild 
cattle, or, indeed, of the wild cattle of any period of the 
earth’s history, for no equally diminutive fossil member of 
the group appears to be known. An idea of the extremely 
diminutive proportions of the anoa, or sapi-utan, as the 
animal in question is respectively called by the inhabitants 
of Celebes and the Malays, may be gained when it is 
stated that its height at the shoulder is only about 3 ft. 
3 in., whereas that of the great Indian wild ox, or gaur, 
is at least 6 ft. 4 in. In fact, the anoa is really not 
much, if at all, larger than a well-grown Southdown sheep, 
and scarcely exceeds in this respect the little domesticated 
Indian Bramini cattle. 
The anoa has many of the characters of the large 
Indian buffalo, but its horns are relatively shorter, less 
curved, and more upright. In this, as well as in certain 
other respects, it is more like the young than the adult 
of the last-named species; and as young animals fre- 
quently show ancestral features which are gradually lost 
as maturity is approached, it would be a natural suppo- 
sition that the anoa is a primitive type of buffalo. This 
idea receives a remarkable confirmation from the circum- 
stance that in the later Tertiary strata of Northern India 
there occur skulls of anoa-like buffaloes, which, however, 
in correlation with the continental area where they are 
met with, indicate animals of considerably larger dimen- 
sions than the living Celebes animal. In fact the latter, 
together with the somewhat larger wild buffalo, or 
