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Show 596 MR. W. T. BLANFORD ON THE INDIAN GAUR. [Nov. 4, bisontine subdivision, although they were referred to the latter Hamilton Smith and others. Our present knowledge of the range of the three species of this section of Bos may be thus summarized : - Bos gaurus.-The Gaur is found in all the larger forest-tracts of the Indian Peninsula from the Ganges to Cape Comorin, but not in Ceylon. Its extreme north-western range, at present, I believe to be in the neighbourhood of the river Nerbudda east of Broach, and west of long. 80° E. the valley of the Nerbudda forms approximately its northern limit, though it may in places exist a little further north. It does not inhabit the grass-jungles of the great Indus and Ganges plain, except to the eastward in the neighbourhood of the Himalayas; in fact this animal is seldom, if ever, found far away from hilly ground. It occurs in the forests along the base of the Himalayas as far west as Nepal, and is met with in the hill-regions south of Assam and thence in all suitable localities throughout Burma and the other countries immediately east of the Bay of Bengal down to the southern extremity of the Malay Peninsula, where its occurrence is no new discovery, for Blyth recorded its existence there in the paper already quoted l. The range of the Gaur in Siam, Cochin China, Tonquin, &c. does not appear to have been ascertained with any certainty; it is said to occur in Siam, but I can find no record of its occurrence further east, and no mention of the existence of any flat-horned bovine in South China is made by Swinhoe. The Gaur is unknown in the Malay islands and in Ceylon, but the statement has repeatedly been made that it formerly inhabited the latter. I am disposed to think this doubtful, and I quite agree with Sanderson 2 in m y surprise that the Gaur should have disappeared from a region where wild Elephants are still found in large numbers. Throughout the Peninsula of India the reverse is the case; the Elephant has, I think, clearly been the first to disappear, as in the Satpuras, the Northern Syhadri, and throughout parts of Cbutia Nagpur, where the Gaur still occurs. A belief in the former occurrence of Bos gaurus in Ceylon is partly founded on the fact that Knox, writing in 1681, mentioned under the name of Guavera an animal kept tame at Kandy, and partly on Kelaart's statement3 that " the Kandyans also say that the Goura once roamed through those forests which to the present day are called after the Goura, Goura- Ellia, Goura-Koodie, &c." On the other hand, it is by no means improbable that the Gaur, like the Tiger, never inhabited Ceylon, a circumstance very possibly due to the animal not having migrated into Southern India until after Ceylon had been separated by sea. Bos sondaicus.-The Banteng is entirely confined to countries east of the Bay of Bengal. The northernmost localities from which it 1 Cantor too, in 1846, stated that the Gaur was " numerous in the Malayan Peninsula " (J. A. S. B. xv. p. 273). 2 ' Thirteen Years among the Wild Beasts of India,' p. 243. 3 Prodromus Faun. Zeyl. p. 87. Iu Griffith's ' Cuvier,' v. p. 410, too, it is stated that the wild ox or Guavera of Ceylon was shot by British parties during the war with Kandy. But the animals shot may have been wild Buffaloes. |
