Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 5.djvu/349

Rh habitations of Lake Constance, where they have been made into utensils. By this means every thing relating to the great-horned wild-ox has become thoroughly known. The Bos primigenius is no other than the urus of Cæsar, Seneca, and Pliny, the bubalus of Fortunatus and Gregory of Tours, a species contemporaneous with the great pachyderms and great carnivora extinct long before historic times, but which continued to live amid the forests of Central Europe until completely exterminated by men, only eight or ten centuries ago.

The bison of the ancients, now called the aurochs, is not entirely destroyed, though its early complete disappearance is threatened. It yet lives in the condition of a zoological specimen, and there have been opportunities of late of seeing it in some menageries. Formerly it was spread over the greater part of Europe, but it has only been found in certain regions since the historic period began. Aristotle mentions it under the name of bonasus, as an animal of Pœnia, that is, of the part of Thrace which is now Bulgaria, and gives a tolerably exact description of it. That which particularly strikes the Greek author in the bonasus is its body, larger than that of the common ox, the mane covering its nape to the shoulders and falling over its eyes, and the woolly hair, of a reddish gray on the lower parts; marks which agree only with those of the bison. Oppian and Pausanias, as well as Seneca and Pliny, speak of the bison, so easily recognized by his heavy neck and shoulders, rounded forehead, shaggy back, and long legs. It was supposed that the aurochs had already disappeared from Gaul at the time of the Roman invasion, because Cæsar makes no mention of it. The proof is imperfect, and it cannot be doubted that the bison was still existing, several centuries later, together with the great wild-ox, at least in Ardennes and the Vosges. It seems to have maintained itself much later in the great Hercynian forest, which stretched from the Rhine to the Danube; but, since a date that cannot be exactly fixed, it has ceased to inhabit the eastern parts of Europe. In our time there remain only a few pairs in Lithuania, in the forest of Bialovicza and in the Caucasus. In the latter country it would appear that the aurochs is now quite rare, for Prof. Brandt, of St. Petersburg, the savant who has given most study to the mammals of Russia, had fears that the disappearance of this fine animal was complete; but he learned that they were still to be met with in a locality called Rudeln. More recently we have been informed that a small herd of some fifty animals was known to exist near the village of Atzikhar, on the upper Ouroup. Not a solitary one would remain either in Lithuania or the Caucasus, did not the Russian law forbid taking or killing an aurochs without imperial permission, under pain of death.

The elk, the stag, the chamois, and the wild-goat, still belong to the European fauna; but, unless measures are taken to check the destruction of these mammals, very few centuries will pass before their complete extermination.