EXISTING KINDS OF WILD CATTLE 235 
itself. Other characteristic features are to be found 
in the large size of the flapping ears, which are 
heavily fringed at the margin with long hair, the 
relative shortness of the face, and the circumstance 
that the hair (when any remains) along the middle 
line of the neck and back is directed uniformly 
backwards from the head to the root of the tail. 
Buffaloes conforming more or less closely to this 
type, but generally with a minor development of 
the helmet-like expansion of the bases of the horns 
— which consequently become much flattened, as in 
B. caffer i^adcliffei of Uganda — extend northwards 
through eastern Africa to Abyssinia ; and there can 
be little hesitation in regarding all these animals 
as nothing more than local races of the great southern 
species, in spite of the circumstance that in some of 
them the hair shows a more or less decided tendency 
to become brown. 
On the other hand, in Ashanti and neighbouring 
countries of the west coast, in place of these huge 
black buffaloes, with their closely approximated and 
frequently helmet-like horn-bases, and long receding 
horns, we meet with a small dun-red buffalo, locally 
known to Europeans as the bush-cow, and standing 
only between and 4 feet at the shoulder, with 
relatively short and more or less upwardly-directed 
horns, of which the bases, although flattened, do not 
form a helmet-like mass, and are separated from one 
another by a considerable interval, while their middle 
portion is in front of rather than behind the plane of 
the forehead. 
If we had only the big black Cape buffalo and 
the dwarf red Ashanti or Congo buffalo to deal with, 
there would be little hesitation in regarding them as 
