Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 77.djvu/601

Rh and the true oxen, the most useful of all creatures to man, which spread to Europe as Bos primigenius, the ancestor of Bos taurus.

The sheep also found their expression point in India, and their home to-day is central Asia. So too the domestic goat yet lives wild in western Asia, a less plastic type, but purely Asiatic in origin. Indeed, of the whole family of Bovidæ, Asia was the origin and dispersal center, and it is a curious fact that it still remains the home of the higher types while others of lower degree have wandered afar to find their homes in Africa, Europe and America. The camelids after long ages of exclusive development in North America migrated to Asia to find their highest evolution in the true camels, the highest and probably final stage in the evolution of the family, while their kin, of lower degree, went southward to terminate in the llama and alpaca, the only mammals among all man's servants which we can say with tolerable certainty have been entirely beyond the influence, direct or indirect, of Asiatic environment. The reindeer, the highest of all the cervid family, doubtless arose in northern Asia; certainly its home is in part there, though some of its early kin migrated to America and have left their descendants in the caribous. And India was the birthplace, as it is the home, of the pig, whence came originally our domesticated swine. "Whether or not we give to Sus the highest place among the non-ruminant, even-toed ungulate mammals, or to the Babirussa, matters not, for both are of Asiatic origin.

Of the odd-toed ungulates our domestic horse, Equus caballus, stands on the very summit; and Equus caballus arose in Asia, where its ancestors yet have their wild progeny. And I believe that eventually we must give to Asia the honor of the birthplace of the genus itself. And the next lower type of the Equidæ, the asses, are of Asiatic ancestry, though our domestic species comes from Arabia and Africa, while the most primitive of the horses yet living found their refuge in Africa.

Southern or central Asia was the birthplace in early Pliocene times of the elephants, and was their dispersal center; and, in Elephas indicus, the only domesticated species, we have the last and highest stage in the evolution of the Proboscidea, and, as is the case with the cape buffalo, the zebras, wart hogs and others, we find in Africa their only living kin, of more primitive form and untamable.

Of all the great order of Carnivora the genus Felis admittedly occupies the highest place. The home of the cats is southern Asia and there doubtless was their birthplace and the center of their dispersal. The known paleontological record of the true cats is very meager indeed, and doubtless always will be till we know more of the Pliocene and Pleistocene faunas of Asia. Two of the domesticated cats, the Siamese and the cheetah, are of immediate Asiatic origin, and our