68 
PASSIONAL ZOOLOGY. 
brow is adorned with inoffensiv'e horns, which curl bach over either 
ear ? I know not, but nevertheless I see among tha beasts of my 
acquaintance only the bison of America that coriesponds with the 
above description ; and yet the American bison resembles the bo- 
nasos of Aristotle and the bison of Oppian only by the mane. 
For the rest, we know that the ancients easily lost their wits on 
the subject of horns, and Oppian in particular, found them every- 
where, even in the tusks of the elephant. It is not the less cer- 
tain that there existed in France, in the times of Charlemagne, a 
powerful race of wild ruminants that were called bisons, and hunt- 
ed in the royal chases in connection with the urns ; since the Monk 
of Saint Gall, describing the feasts given by the great Emperor of 
the West to the embassadors of the Calif Ilaraoun A1 Easchid, 
speaks of hecatombs of uruses and bisons immolated at this con- 
juncture (uros et bisontes). Pausanias also has spoken of the bi- 
son in describing Phocis. 
He explains how the games of the circus made a frightful con- 
sumption of bisons, and how they went about to procure them in 
Greece. 
The procedure is not very ingenious ; it consists in digging a 
ditch, with slippery edges, at the bottom of a sloping forest, so 
that the animal should fall in. Once imprisoned, it is subdued by 
starvation. I wonder that more precise descriptions are not given 
of a beast which entered into public feasts as an element of the 
drama vand of pleasure in the public festivals. 
As to the urus, no doubt about its identity. Julius Cmsar sig- 
nalizes it in a passage of his sixth book de. hello Galileo, He be- 
gins by giving it a stature a little smaller than that of the ele- 
phant, inagnitudine 2 ^ciulo infra ele^diantos, and afterward gratifies 
it with an incomparable force and swiftness, that causes it to pre- 
cipitate itself headlong on all that it meets, beasts and men. It is 
impossible not to recognize under these features the urus of the 
forest of Ardennes, in the time of Charlemagne, and the present 
urus of Lithuania. The urus leaves France toward the end of the 
second race ; history says nothing more of its path toward the fa- 
tal epoch of the Norman invasion. At this same epoch, when the 
urus left us without intention of returning (878), France sustained 
