6426 



Notice of the various 



of the urox, which must have belonged to an animal more than 12 feet 

 in length from the nape to the root of the tail, and 6j feet high. On 

 one the distance between the base of the horns above is inches, 

 below 13^ inches; the thickness at the root 15 inches [i.e. of the 

 bony horn-cores ! The skull of a cow in the British Museum, figured 

 by Professor Owen, measures 30 inches from crown to tips of inter- 

 maxillaries !] The largest Scanian ox I have seen," continues Pro- 

 fessor Nilsson, "and which was of an unusually large size, measured 

 in length, from the nape to the root of the tail, 8 feet, and was 5 feet 

 high over the mane. When we now consider that bulls and cows 

 never reach the size that oxen do, and that we ought to compare the 

 bull or the cow to the wild ox kind, we shall then easily perceive that 

 this last-mentioned was much larger than the tame ox, and perhaps he 

 was even somewhat bigger in the southern regions, for example, in 

 Germany, than here in Sweden. Caesar's account that the urus was 

 c magnitudine paulo infra elephantos,' was not so exaggerated as one 

 has imagined." 



The size of the urus may, in fact, be estimated as at least one-third 

 larger, in linear dimensions, than the largest breeds of existing Euro- 

 pean cattle, and with proportionally even larger and longer horns than 

 certain Italian, Sicilian and Hungarian bullocks, which are noted for 

 the size of these appendages. Such were the formidable animals which 

 Julius Caesar describes as both strong and swift, at the same time so 

 spiteful that they spared neither man nor other creature when they once 

 caught sight of them. With the chase of these animals the Germanic 

 youth became hardened, and the greater the number of horns of dead 

 oxen they could exhibit the more highly were they esteemed. — (Bell. 

 Gall. vol. vi. chap. 28.) One of Professor Nilsson's specimens u has 

 on its back a palpable mark of a wound from a javelin. Several cele- 

 brated anatomists and physiologists of the present day, among whom," 

 he remarks, " I need only mention the names of John Miiller, of Berlin, 

 and And. Retzius, of Stockholm, have inspected this skeleton, and are 

 unanimous in the opinion that the hole in question upon the back- 

 bone is the consequence of a wound which, during the life of the 

 animal, was made by the hand of man. The animal must have been 

 very young, probably only a calf, when it was wounded. The hunts- 

 man who cast the javelin must have stood before it. * * * It was 

 yet young when it died, probably not more than three or four years old, 

 and not unlikely was drowned by falling through the ice into the water, 

 where, in after times, a turf-bog has formed over it. The skeleton lay 



