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According to the most authentic authorities, Cuvier, Herman von Meyer, and Owen, four great types of oxen existed in Europe in early times—first, the Bos priscus, or Urus, the great Auroch which the Roman armies found in the primeval forests of Germany and Belgium, and of which a few specimens still remain in the imperial preserves of Lithuania—the chief modem representative of which is the bison. It was a creature with long horns rising above the head, a narrow forehead, high frontal crest, projecting orbits, and a warm shaggy coat. The stuffed specimens I have examined in the museums of Vienna and Frankfort were of a reddish brown-colour, and of great size. The second is the Bos primigenus of Boganus, which was also found by the Romans among the fastnesses and entangled forests of uncultivated Europe—with long slightly curved horns, set on at right angles with the head, but turning forwards at the extremities, and spreading to a breadth of nearly five feet from tip to tip; and of which beast it is conjectured the present race of horned cattle in Europe spring. Some degenerate descendants still exist in Sicily; but the Cape buffalo affords the best specimens of the long-homed species. A third extinct ox, described and named Bos trochocerus by Meyer, had a very narrow head, and long cylindrical horn-cores rising high above the level of the back of the occiput, and then curving forwards and inwards. All these three have been found in diluvial deposits—the last, however, only in Germany. The fourth, which is almost peculiar to Ireland, has been denominated Bos longifrons (the long-fronted or small fossil ox), somewhat of a misnomer, it must be confessed, became, properly speaking, it should be denominated Bos latifrons, from the exceeding breadth of forehead and face, in which particular it differs in an especial manner from either of the three former. It is the type of the present short-horn, and the first specimen recorded came from this country long before the present century. "A frontlet and horn-core of this species," says Professor Owen, in his beautiful work upon British Fossil Mammals and Birds, "formed part of the original collection of John Hunter, in the manuscript catalogue of which collection it was recorded as having been obtained, from a bog in Ireland." I had entered it in the catalogue of the Museum of the College of Surgeons in 1830, under the name of Bos brachyceros, on account of its peculiarly short horns; and, after the imposition of that name upon a living African species, to Bos longifrons, under which the remains of this interesting species or variety were described in my "Report on British Fossil Mammalia." In 1839 Dr. Ball, our late Treasurer, brought the subject of the remains of oxen found in bogs in Ireland before the Academy; but the few lines which I find upon the subject in the "Proceedings" has in no wise elucidated the matter or assisted my researches. The animal he described was evidently the small fossil ox of Hunter. He also in 1844 noticed the circumstance in the third volume of the "Transactions of the Geological Society of Dublin," but does not say where or how the specimens were found.
It will be in the recollection of some of the senior members of the
