The Birds of the Assyrian Monuments and Records. 49 
i Tristram, and lately Mr. Cheyne, in his valuable work on the 
! Prophecies of Isaiah, have decided against the white antelope; 
I and though some of these writers are wrong in referring the 
rem to the buffalo, which found its way westerly from India only 
t in, comparatively speaking, recent times, yet such an animal 
would answer better to the fierce creature spoken of in the 
Book of Job, than " the white doe of Golius." The identity 
of the rem or remu with the Bos primigenius is, I maintain, 
fully established by the most convincing evidence, as I have 
shown in a former paper in the Society's " Transactions/' 
evidence which stands on bases zoological, palseontological, 
and historical, as shown by the figures of the wild cattle on 
the Assyrian monuments compared with the form and size of 
the horn-cores and skulls preserved in our museums, as well 
as by the interesting fact that remains of this bos have been 
found in the very localities where an Assyrian monarch 
states he killed these animals. I should state that recently 
Dr. W. Lotz, in his valuable work, " Die Inschriften Tiglath 
Pileser's I," has written to show that the am and the am-si 
of the Accadian records are two distinct animals, the former 
being the rimu, or " wild bull," the latter the " elephant," 
J names which, with other writers, I had considered as 
; synonymous, the latter term being merely the fuller form 
of the other. There are a few difficulties which at present 
strike me as attending Dr. Lotz's explanation ; but these will 
probably vanish after a thorough investigation of the whole 
I argument, and Dr. Lotz will be found to be right. 
You will observe, in the course of this paper, that the 
names of several birds are onomato-poetic, mere human 
attempts to give an idea of the sounds emitted by various 
birds by incorporating that idea in the word thus irnitatively 
formed. This is to be expected. Without saying a word on 
the question of the possibility of any language having been 
j formed on the principle of imitation, or seeming in any way 
to be a disciple of what has been called the Bow-wow school 
of philologists, it is quite certain that the Bow-wow theory is 
to a considerable extent true in the formation of bird and 
other animal names. The old Accadians and Assyrians had 
their ku-cus and their dic-dic-i birds just as we have, and they 
Vol. VIII. 4 
