THE YAK.
The Yak is naturally an inhabitant of the very high plateaux and mountains of Tibet, where the climate is cold and the air excessively dry. Lower down on the Indian side of the Himalaya a smaller race is found domesticated, which is the only one able to stand the climate of India, or of Europe, where it is now kept in some parks as a curiosity. The tamed yaks are usually much smaller than the wild; these sometimes reach a weight of between 1,100 and 1,200 lbs. In form they are long and low, very massive, and with hair almost entirely black; this falls off along the sides into a long sweeping fringe. The tail is thickly tasselled with fine hair, and is employed by Indian princes for fly-flaps. The wild yak has large, massive black horns, curved upwards and forwards in the male. In Ladak and Chinese Tibet the yaks inhabit a desolate and barren country, in which their main food is a dry, coarse grass, on which they nevertheless contrive to keep themselves in condition, feeding in the mornings and evenings, and lying down by day to rest among the rocks.
Photo by W. P. Dando] [Regent's Park
INDIAN HUMPED CATTLE.
These are often called Zebu in Europe, but the origin of the name in unknown.
THE BISON.
The Bison form a marked group, differing from others of the Ox Tribe. They possess fourteen pairs of ribs, while the oxen have only thirteen (the yak has fourteen); and have very heavy, massive heads, broader and more convex foreheads than the oxen, longer spinal processes on the vertebrae of the front part of the back, and larger muscles to hold the ponderous head, causing a hump, which in the American bison is very marked. There are two living species of bison, one of which is found in Europe, the other in North America.
The European Bison.
This is the most interesting survival of the primitive fauna of the Old World. It is still found wild, though protected, in a large forest in Lithuania, the property of the Czar of Russia, called the Forest of Bielowitza. A few are also left of the purely wild stock in the Caucasus. Those in Lithuania have been protected for several centuries, and the herd is numbered from time to time. In 1857 there were 1,898 of these bison left; in 1882 there were only 600; in 1889 the herd had sunk to 380, but in 1892 it had risen to 491. The presence of the bison in the Caucasus had been almost forgotten till Mr. Littledale and Prince Demidoff gave accounts of hunting it there quite recently. The Zubr, as it is called, only survives in some very inaccessible parts of the mountains, preserved by the Grand Duke Sergius Michaelovitch, in the Kouban district. There it exists as a really wild animal. The dimensions of one recently shot were 10 feet from the muzzle to the end of the last vertebra of the tail. The Grand Duke has to obtain special permission from the Czar to shoot one whenever he goes to the Caucasus.