Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 5.djvu/347

Rh Judging from that circumstance, naturalists are inclined to think that the great-horned elk must have long survived the extinction of the great pachyderms. Of late years bones of this species have been found in such quantities as to allow the construction of entire skeletons.

If the existence of the Irish elk is too much a thing of the past to have received historic mention, the case is otherwise with the great wild-ox of Europe (Bos primigenius of naturalists), an animal whose size surpassed by a third that of our domestic oxen. This ruminant has left abundant remains in the bottoms of water-courses, in alluvials, peat-bogs, and caves. Like the bison which still survives, it inhabited the forests of Central Europe less than 1,000 years ago. The fact is proved by the writings of old authors. Cæsar was not acquainted with the bison, but he describes with vivid touches the wild-oxen of the Hercynian forest, which he calls by the name of the urus. "They have," says the Roman conqueror, "a stature little below that of elephants; in appearance, color, and form, they are like bulls. Of great swiftness and extremely powerful, they spare neither men nor beasts when seen. They are taken in trenches skillfully prepared. The youths fit themselves to endure fatigue by the practice of hunting these animals. Those who kill many of them display their horns publicly in proof, and receive great applause. The urus can neither be tamed nor accustomed to the sight of man, even though taken very young. The horns of these animals differ much from those of our oxen, in size, shape, and appearance. They are much sought after by the natives, who decorate the edges with a silver circlet, and use them for goblets at great feasts."

The two bovine species of ancient Europe are plainly designated in Seneca's verses: wild-oxen, with great horns, and bisons, with shaggy backs. Pliny makes the same distinction between the wild-oxen of Germany, bisons having a mane, and the urus remarkable for strength and swiftness, to which the name of bubalus is commonly wrongly given. That name really belongs to the buffalo (Bos buhalus), an animal native to Asia, and long ago well known to the Greeks; but it is generally used in the middle ages to denote the urus of Cæsar. The species had not disappeared from the forests of the Vosges and Ardennes during the first centuries of the French monarchy, for Gregory of Tours relates that, by order of King Gontran, a chamberlain, his nephew, and a forest-keeper, were put to death, for having killed a "bubal" in a royal forest situated in the Vosges. Besides, Venuntius Fortunatus, the poet, bishop of Poitiers in 599, mentions in his verses the bubal among the animals hunted in Ardennes and the Vosges by Gogoor, the first mayor of the palace of Austrasia, mentioned in history. The existence together in the Central European forests of the two ruminants mentioned by Latin authors is once more attested by a passage in the famous poem of the "Nibelungen." It is the description of a magnificent hunt; the Burgunds dwell on the banks of the