2 26 THE OX AND ITS KINDRED 
The great straight-horned buffalo of Assam is repre- 
sented in the collection of the British Museum by a 
pair of detached horns and a skull with horns of bulls, 
and the skull and horns of a cow. The two detached 
horns were discovered about the middle of the 
eighteenth century in a cellar at Wapping by a 
patient of Sir Hans Sloane, to whom they were given 
in lieu of a fee ; they came into the possession of the 
British Museum at its foundation in the year 1753, 
with the rest of the Sloane collection, and are by far 
the longest on record, each measuring 77J inches in 
length along the curve, so that the span of the pair 
would have been about 14 feet. The skull and horns 
are those of a bull killed by Colonel J. Matthie on 
8th April 1842, in Assam, and presented to the 
Museum by their owner in 1855. They are figured 
by Dr. J. E. Gray in the Proceedings of the Zoological 
Society for the latter year (pi. xl.), and measure 
65! inches along the curve. The horns of cows are 
of the same general type, but very long and slender. 
There was at one time an idea, although not 
among most naturalists, that horns of the straight 
type are those of cows, and those of the lunate type 
bulls. This, however, is disproved not only by the 
enormous size of the two pairs of horns, whose history 
is given above, of the straight^ type in the British 
Museum, but likewise by the occurrence of stout and 
slender modifications of both types, the former 
belonging to bulls and the latter to cows. 
Apparently the Bos bubalis of Linnaeus is the tame 
Indian buffalo, and from this the circular-horned wild 
race differs so slightly that both may be included under 
the title of B. bubalis typicus. In 1792, however, 
Kerr, in his edition of the Sy sterna Natur<^ of 
