There are several little jokes concealed in scientific nomenclature. The absurd name Zebu now indelibly branded on the humped cow (Bos Sacer) of Africa and Asia is one of these. That noble naturalist M. Buffon once met some showmen going to a fair with a Brahminy bull and was told that its name, when it was at home, was "Zebu." There is a fine foreign touch in this word, as in that other showman's invention, the "Guyascutis," so the great man wrote it down, and scientific Europe, following his lead, has inscribed this fragment of a French showman's boniment so deeply on its august records that it cannot now be effaced. No such word is known in India, where "the cow" suffices for all needs. "Brahminy cow" appears to be used by untravelled English folk, and, as distinguishing the true cow from the low-caste buffalo, is the best name possible; if India is to be considered the chief home of humped cattle.
CHAPTER VII
OF BUFFALOES AND PIGS
"Dark children of the mere and marsh,
Wallow and waste and lea;
Outcast they wait at the village gate
With folk of low degree.
"Their pasture is in no man's land,
Their food the cattle's scorn;
Their rest is mire and their desire
The thicket and the thorn.
"But woe to those who break their sleep
And woe to those who dare
To rouse the herd-bull from his keep,
The wild boar from his lair."
R. K.
Many Europeans speak of the Indian buffalo, which is the familiar buffalo of Egypt and Italy, as the "water buffalo," from its predilection for wallowing in swamps. "Yoke a buffalo and a bullock together and the buffalo will head towards the pool, the ox to the upland," says a proverb, but none the less this unequal yoke is often seen. Hindus of the old rock say a buffalo is unlucky to keep, the black antithesis of the benignant cow,—a demon to an angel. On going out in the morning it is an ill omen if the eye rests on a buffalo, while the sight of a cow is good. The passion of the Hindu for bright colours, and his rooted hatred of black and dingy tones, are the groundwork of this aversion. Its uncouth shape as compared with the smooth outlines of the cow also counts in the buffalo's exclusion from bovine kinship. The vertebræ stand up on its crest like park palings, and the skeleton suggests paleontology as much as actual natural history, though the creature is an unmistakable cow. Not that the Hindu ever thought of generic relationships, for the rhinoceros, which is still more remote in kind, counts as a superior cow, and a vessel used in Shiv worship, representing the female energy, is reckoned of precious sanctity when made of rhinoceros horn. The Nilghai too, which is an antelope, is accounted a cow and equally honoured.