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Show ANNOTATIONS AND ADDITIONS. 61 cal album, reminding one of the botanical album of Ruiz and Pavon's Flora Peruviana, in which the names of new genera of plants were adapted to the Court Calendar, and to the various changes taking place in the Oficiales de la Secretaria. To the east of the Mississippi dense forests still partially pre·mil; but to the west of the river there are only Prairies, in which the buffalo (Bos americanus), and the musk ox (Bos moschatus), feed in large herds. Both these animals (the largest of the New World) serve the wandering Indians, the Apaches Llaneros and the Apaches Lipanos, for food. The Assiniboins sometimes kill in a few days from seven to eight hundred bisons in what are called "bison parks," artificial enclosures into which the wild herds are driven. (Maximilian, Prinz zu Wied, Reise in das innere Nord-America, bd. i. 1839, s. 443.) The American bison, or buffalo, called by the Mexicans cibolo, which is frequently killed merely for the sake of the tongue, a much-prized dainty, is by no means a mere variety of the Aurochs of the Old Continent; although some other kinds of animals, as the elk (Cervus aloes) and the reindeer (Cervus tarandus), and even, in the human race, the short·statured polar. man, are common to the northern parts of both continents, evidencing their former long-continued connection. The Mexicans call the European ox in the Aztec dialect "quaquahue," a horned animal, from quaquahuitl, a horn. Some very large horns of cattle found in the ancient Mexican buildings, not far from Cuernavaca, to the southwest of the city of Mexico, appear to me to have belonged to the musk ox. The Canadian bison can be tamed to agricultural labor. It breeds with the European cattle, but it was long uncertain whether the hybrid was fruitful. Albert Gallatin, who, before he appeared in Europe as a distinguished diplomatist, had obtained by personal inspection great knowledge of the uncultivated parts of the United States, assures us that "the mixed breed was quite common fifty years ago in some of the north-western counties of Virginia; and the cows, the issue of that mixture, propagated like all others." "I do not remember," he adds, "the grown bison being tamed, but sometimes young bison calves were caught by dogs, and were brought up and driven out with the European cows." At Monongahela all the cattle were for a long time of this mixed breed: but complaints 6 |