280 On the Animals designated in the Scriptures by 



species, in fact, yet exists in the African buffalo, described in 

 such formidable colours by Bruce, Thunberg, and other travel- 

 lers, and yet unsubdued by the colonists of the Cape., after at- 

 tempts have been made to turn his great strength and swiftness 

 to account for the labours of man. Colonel Hamilton Smith 

 has made us acquainted also with one, perhaps more than one, 

 species of wild Indian buffalo, that for size and ferocity would 

 answer to the description in Job ; for in that description we 

 must always remember, there is much of poetical amplifica- 

 tion, like that which we find in the description of the horse, 

 chap, xxxix. 1 9-25. Colonel Smith refers to a gigantic arnee, 

 found in the eastern provinces and forests at the foot of Hima- 

 laya, which the Burmas consider, next to the tiger, the most 

 dangerous and fiercest animal of their forests, (Griffith's Cuvier, 

 vol. iv. p. 389)- He refers also to an anecdote of Captain Wil- 

 liamson, where a true Arnee pursued a sportsman to his ele- 

 phant, and ran its horns under his belly to lift him up. This 

 individual was killed, and was upwards of six feet high at the 

 shoulder, nearly three feet in breadth at the breast, and the 

 horns 5^ feet long. (Id. vol. iv. p. 390.) 



The Behemoth was an inhabitant of the valley of the Jordan; 

 and is it not more likely that some large species of the buffalo 

 might, in early ages, have inhabited that limited district, than 

 the elephant or hippopotamus ? each of which has been conjec- 

 tured to be the Behemoth ; although both obviously want some 

 of the characters, and appear to delight in more southern re- 

 gions. 



From what we know now of the distribution of animal spe- 

 cies, and that some very notable ones are sometimes confined to 

 narrow spaces of the earth, w r e may be at full liberty to suppose 

 the existence, in early times, of a large Buffalo peculiar to the 

 valleys of Palestine and Syria, surrounded as these nearly are 

 by the sea and sandy deserts The extirpation of such a spe- 

 cies, from a narrow country, by the progress of human art and 

 industry, would not be without a well-authenticated parallel in 

 Europe. The Urns has, since the time of Julius Caesar, been 

 extirpated from Germany ; and naturalists are ignorant whether 

 there exists now anywhere the formidable animal which he de- 

 scribes under that name, as being in size little less than the ele- 



