540 THE QUADRUPEDS OF ARIZONA. 
amid scenes that are terribly grand in their frowning 
desolation, is the favorite home of the Rocky Mountain 
Sheep ( Ovis montana). Fearless and intrepid, fully trust- 
ing his powers, he stands in bold relief upon the edge of 
some abyss, —his massive horns, and towering form, and 
sinewy limbs clearly delineated,—the centre-piece of a 
great picture whose background may be a mountain or 
the sky itself. He stands a fitting headstone for the 
graves of the Titans, now quietly slumbering beneath 
the mighty monuments they erected to their own memory 
with their last convulsive throes. 
The Mountain Ram has a very extensive range, which 
includes nearly all the elevated mountains and broken re- 
gions from our northernmost Territories into Mexico. In 
Arizona it has been formerly much more abundant than 
now, for though it still exists in the more inaccessible 
portions, it is rarely to be seen. But its great horns may 
be found scattered about the bases of nearly every cliff 
and precipice. 
There is abundant evidence that the Buffalo (Bos 
Americanus) formerly ranged over Arizona, though none 
exist there now. The habitat of this “monarch of the- 
plains” is contracting year by year, and its numbers are 
gradually diminishing. Like the Indian, the buffalo 
seems doomed to disappear before the overwhelming tide 
of advancing civilization, and must before long, though 
not in our day, be known only in history. The nature 
and needs of both are diametrically opposed to the spirit 
of the white man’s progress; and in the inevitable con- 
flict, —with them for bare existence, with us for suprem- 
acy,—they cannot hold their own. Sad spectacle, this 
passing away of a race of men, and of a species of anl- 
mal; yet in strict obedience to an inexorable, mysterious 
