trapped in pitfalls, the
hunters unsparingly kill. The youths, exercising themselves by this sort
of hunting, are hardened by the toil, and those among them who have
killed most, bringing with them the horns, as testimonials, acquire
great praise. But these Uri cannot be habituated to man, nor made
tractable, not even when taken young. The great size of the horns, as
well as the form and quality of them, differs much from those of our
oxen."

It is probable that this race extended widely over Europe, and even into
Asia. Herodotus mentions Macedonian wild oxen, with exceedingly large
([Greek: hypermegathia]) horns; and Philip of Macedon killed a wild bull
in Mount Orbela, which had made great havoc, and produced much terror
among the inhabitants; its spoils he hung up in the Temple of Hercules.
The Assyrian artists delighted to sculpture on the royal bas-reliefs of
Nineveh the conquest of the wild bull by the prowess of their Nimrod
monarchs, and the figures, in their minute anatomical characters, well
agree with the descriptions and remains of the European _Urus_. The
large forest that surrounded ancient London was infested with _boves
sylvestres_ among other wild beasts, and it is probable that these were
_Uri_. The legendary exploit of Guy, Earl of Warwick, in freeing the
neighbourhood from a terrible dun cow, whether historically true or not,
shews the existence of formidable wild bovines in the heart of England,
and the terror they inspired among the people. The family of Turnbull,
in Scotland, are traditionally said to owe their patronymic to a hero
who turned a wild bull from Robert the Bruce, when it had attacked him
while hunting.

What has become of the terrible Uri which lived in Europe at the
commencement of the Christian era? Advancing civilisation has rooted
them out, so that no living trace of them remains, unless the
cream-white breed which is preserved in a semi-wild state in some of our
northern parks be their representatives; or, as is not improbable, their
blood may still circulate in our domestic oxen.

Yet there is no doubt of the identity of a species found abundantly in
Britain in the Tertiary deposits, and named by Owen _Bos primigenius_,
with the Urus of Caesar. This fossil bull was as certainly contemporary
in this island with the elephant, and the hyena, and the baboon, and,
strange to say, with the reindeer, and the musk-ox, too--thus combining
a tropical, a temperate, and an arctic fauna