Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/622

 To the stranger the great variety of breeds and their adaptation to a wide range of needs and conditions are not at first apparent. He sees an ox and another ox as he sees a native and another native, without noticing that they belong to distinct families. Orientals have a passion for classifying things, and see scores of differences in rice, cotton, wheat, cattle, and horses, which are barely perceptible even to trained English eyes. But among cattle, though there is a bewildering variety of local breeds, some broad differences may be easily learned. The backward slope of the horns of the large and small breeds of Mysore cattle—perhaps the most popular type in use—the royal bearing of the splendid white or fawn oxen of Guzerat, and the transport and artillery cattle bred in the Government farms, at once strike the eye. These are the aristocrats of the race, but they have appetites proportioned to their size, and are too costly for the ordinary cultivator.



They trot in bullock coaches or draw the springless and uncomfortable but delightfully picturesque native rāth or canopied ox-cart, the wagons of the Government commissariat and of the various Government baggage services.

India has been described by a European as the paradise of horses, and from his point of view the phrase is not unfitting. The natural affinity between horses and Englishmen becomes a