THE OX. 
XIX 
HISTORY. 
introduced, and with which they transport their merchandise, and perform their long journeys from the interior. These waggons, 
though now much smaller than those used by the earlier boors, are still very weighty vehicles, drawn by teams of ten or twelve 
oxen. They are usually driven by a Hottentot, who manages his enormous team with perfect skill, and without the aid of reins. 
He sits behind, holding in his hand a tremendous whip of plaited thong, the handle of which is twelve or fourteen feet in length. 
He uses it with ease, cracking it loudly over the heads of the animals, and, when necessary, hitting an offending bullock : but his 
chief instrument of guidance is the voice; he speaks to the animals by name, directing them to the right or left, to stop or to 
quicken their pace, and enforcing his commands, when necessary, by the stroke of his terrible lash. When the team is large, a 
boy, usually a Hottentot, leads the foremost oxen by a thong fastened about their horns. 
But to turn from the Oxen of distant countries, to those whose economical uses are so important in the civilized nations of 
Europe, we find that the animals, though agreeing in all the common characters which we assign to a species, yet very greatly differ 
in their temperament, form, and uses, with the physical condition of the countries in which they are reared, and the artificial treat¬ 
ment to which they are subjected. It is upon the supplies of food, that the size and strength of the animals seem mainly to de¬ 
pend. Wherever food is supplied in abundance, the Ox becomes enlarged in bulk; and wherever food is deficient, whatever be the 
nature of the climate, his size and strength become less. The Ox of Barbary is as diminutive as that of the Highlands of Scotland, 
because the grasses, his natural food, are burned up during a great part of the year, leaving plants for him to subsist upon as innu- 
tritious as the heaths of the northern mountains. But where the grasses abound, and where the heat of the climate is not sufficiently 
great to wither them up during a great part of the year, the Ox assumes an entirely different character with respect to magnitude and 
strength. The largest Oxen in the world are to be found extending from the mountains of Taurus westward by the Ukraine, and 
the rich valley of the Danube, through Hungary, the more fertile parts of Germany, part of Denmark, Holland, and to England. 
But in the richer parts of other countries on either side of this tract, as in the Maremma of Italy, and the finer valleys of Switzer¬ 
land, and in certain parts of Spain and France, the size of the animals enlarges, and this always in proportion to the natural fer¬ 
tility of the pastures. Art, indeed, by supplying cultivated food, can remedy the effects of natural scarcity, but, in a general sense, 
we find that always the larger breeds are formed in countries of abundant herbage. 
The British Islands present, in the productiveness of the soil, such extremes of fertility and barrenness, as enable us to mark 
the constancy of this law in a greater degree perhaps than in any other country of the same extent. Over the more elevated parts 
of the country, where the heaths, carices, and innutritious junci, form the principal part of the herbage, the Oxen are of small 
stature: as the grasses and leguminous herbage plants become mixed with the others, the size and form of the Oxen become enlarged, 
and still more when artificial food is added to the natural; and in the richest plains of all, where the natural productions of the soil 
and the resources of continued cultivation are combined, the animals acquire their greatest development of form. The Ox of the 
Sutherland mountains, and the Ox of the Yorkshire vales, present to the eye such a diversity of size and aspect, that we might 
almost hold them to be distinct species, did we not know that these extremes are connected by all the intervening gradations from 
the smallest to the largest, and that in all the essential characters which can be regarded as specific they are the same. In this 
country, then, we may be said to possess two general classes of breeds; first, those which are proper to the more mountainous and 
less fertile districts; and, secondly, those which are proper to the plains and richer country. The first class comprehends the 
breeds of Wales, of the mountains of Scotland, and of the high lands of Ireland, as the Pembroke, the West Highland, the Kerry, 
the second comprehends the Long-horned breed and its varieties, the highly cultivated breed of Short-liorns, and the Hereford : 
and, again, there is a class of breeds intermediate between the smaller breeds of the mountains and the larger races of the plains, 
as the Galloway, the Angus, and the beautiful breed of North Devon. 
But, besides the effects of the natural and acquired fertility of districts in modifying the form and characters of these animals, 
so as to form varieties, art and a fitting selection of the breeding parents exercise an influence scarcely less important. Experience 
shows that the characters of the Ox, as of all animals subjected to domestication, are communicated with surprising constancy to 
the young, and become permanent by reproduction between similar individuals. Not only are the properties of form so transmitted, 
but those peculiarities of temperament which render the animals fitted to particular uses, as for the exertion of strength in the 
yoke, for the secretion of fat, or the production of milk. Besides, then, the characters of breeds which are the result of natural 
causes, there is a class of characters the result of breeding and artificial treatment. Some of the finest of the breeds of England 
may be termed artificial, with relation to the means employed to give them their distinctive characters : such was the variety of the 
Long-horned breed formed by Bakewell, such is the modern Durham improved by Colling, and such is the highly esteemed 
breed of Hereford, perfected by Tomkins. These breeds, the finest in the world with respect to their economical uses, although 
bearing an affinity to the parent stocks from which they were derived, have had those peculiar properties which fit them for the 
