Species of Bovine Animals. 



6553 



of taurines. So far as known, all bubalines have, normally, thirteen 

 pairs only of ribs, like the taurines ; not fourteen or fifteen pairs, as 

 normally (so far as known) in the bisontines. 



The Indian buffalo — (Bos Bubalus, L. ; Bubalus buffelus, Gray ; 

 B. Arfia, H. Smith— at least in part ; B. speiroceros and B. macro- 

 ceros, Hodgson). Domestic buffaloes are so familiarly known in this 

 country, that an elaborate description of the appearance of the animal 

 is unnecessary. They are ungainly and clumsy-looking creatures, but 

 useful in their way, from their great strength and fair amount of docility 

 combined with their adaptation to marshy localities and wet and heavy 

 soil. Emphatically, they are the beasts for tilling the ground in ordi- 

 nary rice cultivation, which is mainly conducted by their aid ; and 

 they are the only domestic cattle over extensive regions of the Malayan 

 Peninsula and Archipelago, the south of China, and much of Indo- 

 China, and have long been introduced into Lower Egypt, Italy and 

 Hungary, the marshy tracks bordering on the Black and Caspian Seas, 

 and latterly on the shores of the Gulf of Carpentaria, in Northern Aus- 

 tralia, by the Malays ; and in all these different countries many have 

 returned to wildness, not excepting in Australia. In America it does 

 not appear that the domestic buffalo has ever been introduced, and 

 its name is there usurped by the bison.* There is considerable differ- 

 ence, however, between some of the races of domestic buffaloes, and to 

 this we shall advert in the sequel. 



As an Indian animal, Mr. Hodgson thus describes the common 

 buffalo : — " Habitat of the tame, universal ; of the wild> also every- 

 where that adequate cover and swamp exist. The haunts of the Arna 

 or wild buffalo are the margins rather than the interior or primeval 

 forests. They never ascend the mountains, and adhere, like rhino- 

 ceroses, to the most swampy sites of the districts they frequent. There- 

 is no animal upon which ages of domestication have made so small 

 an impression as upon the buffalo,f the tame species being still most 

 clearly referrible to the wild ones at present frequenting all the great 

 swampy jungles of India. But in those wildernesses, as in the cow- 

 houses, a marked distinction may be observed between the long-horned 

 and curve-horned buffaloes — or the B. macroceros and B. speiroceros 

 of my catalogue — which, whether they be separate species or merely 



* A correspondent of the ' St. Louis Republican ' states, in a late number, that 

 " the Utah mail encountered myriads of 4 buffaloes ' feeding upon the luxuriant grasses 

 of the plains, blocking up the highways, so as to delay it, while deer and antelopes were 

 more numerous than ever seen before.'' 



f We think the donkey might bear comparison. 



xvii. 2 I 



