Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 03.djvu/149

* BISMUTH. 125 BISON. powder that is used as a cosmetic under the name of pearl-tchitc. and also as a pigment. Bis- muth citrate, bisnuitli carbonate, and bismuth and aniinoniiim citrate are otlicinal medicines, and are used cliiefly as astringents. BIS'MTJTHINITE. A bismuth trisulphide that crystallizes in the orthorhombic system. It is of a lead-gray color, and usually occurs massive with a foliated or fibrous structure, al- though sometimes it is found crystalline. The principal localities where this mineral occurs are various places in Cumberland, England; at Mey- mac. France; in Sweden: in Bolivia, South America; also in Beaver Count.v, Utah, and in Fresno and Mono counties, Cal. It has some value as an ore of bismuth. BISON (Lat., Gk. /3i<ru^, hisOn, wild ox; cf. OHG. ^yisullt, Wisaiit, Ger. Wiseni. bison, AS. Wesend, wild ox). A kind of wild cattle, char- acterized by massive and shaggj- fore quarters. The name ' was applied by Pliny and subse- quent Latin writers to a wild ox of Europe otherwise called bonasus, and probably the aurochs. More recentl,y the term has been prop- erl,v extended to the American "buffaloes,' and erroneousl}- to the East Indian gaurs. Zoologi- cally, the word is the name of a bovine genus, including the aurochs {Bison bonasus), the American bison (liison Americanus), and several extinct species of both continents. Bisons differ from other oxen in the excessive development of their fore quarters, where the line of the back arches over the withers in a hump formed by the long dorsal spines that give at- tachment to the very thick and strong muscles needed to support the massive head ; also in their more slender limb-bones and ribs (which number 14 instead of 13), in the breadth and convexity of the front of the skull, where the horns spring from below the top line of the forehead, and in their six, instead of four, nasal bones. "Ex- ternally, they differ in having the head heavily clothed with' long, bushy hair; they ahso possess a hea%->- barb, and the fore legs are heavily fringed with coarse, long hair. The clothing- hair of the body also differs from that of repre- sentatives of the restricted genus Bos and most of its allies in consisting mainl.v of short, curled, crisp wool in place of straight hairs. . . . Their nearest ally is probably the .vak." (Allen.) The females are smaller, less massive and shaggy in the fore quarters than the bulls, and with lighter horns. The two existing species will be treated of below. Three fossil species are recog- nized by .J. A. Allen in his classic monograph, The American Bisons (Cambridge, 1876). One is Bison prisons, a very large, long-horned spe- cies, widel,v distributed in the Pleisto<'ene forma- tions of Europe. Another, named Bison antiquus, is found fossil in northern America, and is so closely similar that .Mien thinks the two might have been local races of a then circmnpolar spe- cies. Both of these are regarded by some natural- ists as direct ancestors of the modern forms. The third is Bison latifrons, a more ancient type (yet belonging to the era preceding the present), which was of gigantic size, with horns that must have spread ten or twelve feet — three to four times that of an.v other species. The Aukociis. bonasus, or zubr, has the gen- eral form of this type, and an old male stands about six feet high'. The color is brown, much darker in the long hair of the fore parts than in the short wool of the sides and flanks. The horns arc alxmt 18 inches long, tapering, spread- ing, and a little curved inward at the point, and the tail is long and heavily tufted. Once widely distrilmted over Continental Europe and Trans- Caucasia (avoiding the Russian steppes), it would long ago have become extinct were it not that guarded bands, numbering in 1898 about 700 individuals, have been protected in the Im- jierial forest preserves of Bialowicza in Lith- uania, while a few hundred more roam semi-wild in the fastnesses of the Caucasus. It has never been reallv domesticated, though several experi- mental crossings have been made between it and tame cattle, the results of which have not been important. It is said to exhibit aversion to association with other cattle, and to retain its ancestral wildness and shyness with great te- nacity. It moves about in small bands, which are easily provoked to anger, and become dangerous by the swiftness of their movements and the overpowering force of their weight in a charge. Its food consists of grass and brushwood, and the leaves and bark of young trees. Its cry is pe- culiar, "resembling a groan or grunt more than the lowing of an ox." It does not attain its full stature till after its sixth year, and lives for about thirty or forty years. TjiE American Bisox, more familiarly known as the "buffalo,' is a slightly smaller, less mas- sive animal than the aurochs, with more slender hind quarters, a shorter tail, and somewhat shorter and more robust horns, but with .a higher hump and greater shagginess about the head and shoulders. The females are greatly inferior to the males in bulk, Audubon giving the weight of an old bull as nearly 2000 pounds, while full-grown, fat females will weigh only 1"200 pounds. In habits it differs broadly from the aurochs in being highly gregarious, the nature of the country permitting it to gather into enormous herds, and in being almost ex- clusively a grazer. "The habitat of the bison," according to Allen, "formerly extended from the Great Slave Lake on the north, in latitude about fi2°, to the north- eastern provinces of ile.xico, as far south as lati- tude 25°. Its range in British North America extended from the Rocky Mountains on the west to the wooded highlands about 600 miles west of Hudson's Bay. or about to a line running southeastward from Great Slave Lake to tlie Lake of the Woods. Its range in the United States formerlv embraced a considerable area west of the Rocky Mountains, its recent remains having been found in Oregon as far west as the Blue Mountains, and farther south it occupied the Great Salt Lake basin, extending westward even to the Sierra Nevada Jlountains, while less than fift.v .vears ago (i.e. until about 1830) it existed over the headwaters of the Green and Grand rivers, and other sources of the Colorado. East of the Rocky Mountains its range extended southward far beyond the Rio (Irande, and east- ward throughout the region drained by the Ohio River and its tributaries. Its northern limit, east of the Mississippi, was the Great Lakes, along which it extended eastward to near the eastern end of Lake Erie. It appears not to have occurred south of the Tennessee River, and only to a limited extent east of the Alleghanics,