Hornless Ruminants. | 897 
or, if they do produce them, they do so with difficulty. 
Here, then, such are the effects of cold.” Beloe, too, has this 
note: “Hippocrates, speaking of the Scythian chariots, says 
they are drawn by oxen which have no horns; that the cold 
events them having any.” Strabo also mentions these ancient 
polled cattle. 
_Herodotus’s opinion as to the cause of hornlessness has been 
accepted by many writers down to modern times. At first sight 
tseems true enough, that in the northern European regions we 
we polled or defectively-horned animals, while in the south we 
See immense-horned races; but exceptions are prominent: in 
the palmated horns of the female reindeer of Arctic regions,— 
sex in deer that is always hornless in all other climes; in the 
led cattle of Southern Europe; and in the no-horn or small- 
horned zebu of India. 
If as is believed, the Scythians, like the Egyptians, were of 
c descent, this fact has its significance. 
: In Poland —It would appear that it is Oliver Goldsmith, in his 
Animated Nature,” whom subsequent English writers, such as 
"ence, 1805, follow in the statement that “the large polled 
Mad of England was probably derived from Poland.” The 
aea ‘large” used by Goldsmith is valuable evidence in connec- 
with the idea held in some quarters, that all polled cattle 
among the small cattle. It is in the Forest of Bialowiza, y 
Poland, that, under the special protection of the Czar, the 
i" European bison” (Bos priscus) is preserved. This is the 
Sechs or Ure ox of the Germans, and the Urus of Cesar. 
ar “al Low (“Domestic Animals of Great Britain”) refers to 
the 3 ae of an ancient writer, who speaks of these Uri of 
x of Poland as black, with a white ridge along the 
a by Tacitus and others—Major Hamilton-Smith, in 
elaborate edition of Baron Cuvier’s “ Animal Kingdom,” 
Passage ; 
Ei To; and the hornless cattle—originally, as it would 
cording 4 man breed, ‘ne armentis quidem aut gloria frontis, 
rare fed. Tacitus—have spread to Iceland and Norway, where 
_ “Qon dried fish, They are now abundant in Scotland, 
S with small and middle-sized horns exist in the Crimea, — ke 
t of Germany, Sweden, France, England, Scotland, — 
