THE SURFACE OF THE GLOBE. 53 



-whose horns, attached to the skin only, are shaken with it*; the oxen 

 of India as swift in flight as horses f ; those no larger than a goat J ; 

 sheep with a large tail§ ; and those of India as large as asses ||. 



Although the ancient accounts of the aurochs, the rein-deer and the 

 elk, are mixed with fable, they still prove that they had some know- 

 ledge of them ; but that the knowledge, founded on the accounts of 

 ignorant persons, had not been submitted to a critical judgment^. 

 These animals dwell in the country assigned to them by the ancients, 

 and have only disappeared in countries too much cultivated for their 

 habits of life ; the aurochs and the elks still live in the forests of 

 Lithuania, which formerly joined the forest of Hercynia. There are 

 aurochs in the north of Greece, as in the time of Pausanias. The rein- 

 deer inhabits the north, in the cold regions which it has always in- 

 habited ; there it changes colour, not according to its will, but to the 

 seasons. It was by a series of inexcuseable mistakes that it was 

 thought they would be found in the Pyrenees in the fourteenth cen- 

 tury **. The white bear was seen in Egypt during the reign of the 

 Ptolemies ff . 



Lions and panthers were common at Rome in the games ; they were 

 exhibited by hundreds ; there were even tigers ; the striped hyena, 

 and the crocodile of the Nile, were there produced. There are in the 

 artificial mosaics preserved at Rome excellent representations of the 

 rarest of these species ; amongst others, the striped hyena accurately 

 depicted on a fragment preserved in the museum in the Vatican ; and 

 when I was in Rome (in 1809) they discovered in a garden beside the 

 arch of Gallienus, a mosaic pavement of natural stones arranged in 

 the Florentine manner, representing four Bengal tigers, admirably 

 done. 



The museum of the Vatican contains a basalt crocodile, very nearly 

 accurate^ ; we cannot doubt but that the hippotigris was the zebra, 

 which, however, is only found in the southern parts of Africa§§. 



f .-Elian, ii, 20. f Id. xv, 24. % Id. ibid. 



§ Id. Anim. iii. 5. || Id. iv. 32. 



If See in. my Researches the chapters on deer and oxen. 



** Buffon having read in Du Fouilloux a passage quoted from Gaston-Phebus, 

 Count de Foix, in which that prince describes the rein-deer hunt, imagined that that 

 animal existed in the Pyrenees at that period ; and the printed editions of Gaston 

 are so faulty, that it was with difficulty ascertained what the author means to say ; 

 but having reverted to the original manuscript, which is preserved in the king's 

 library, I have found that it was in Xueden and Nourwergue (Sweden and Norway), 

 that he says he saw and partook of the chase of rein-deer. 



•f-f* Athen^e, lib. v. 



XX There is no error except that there is a nail too many at the back of the foot. 

 Augustus exhibited thirty-six. Dion. lib. xv. 



§§ Caracalla killed one in the circus. Dion. lib. lxxvii. Cinf. Gisb. Cuperi de 

 Elipt. in nummis obviis, ex. ii. cap. 7. 



