It is known with reasonable certainty that many insects have voices so highly pitched that they cannot be heard with the human ear. One evidence of this fact is that some people can distinguish cries of insects which are not audible to others. But even if there are a few notes lost to many of us, there is enough insect music to prove vastly entertaining to those who take interest in the insect world, and the peculiar methods of its inhabitants in communicating with each other.
DOMESTIC ANIMALS
CATTLE.
CATTLE is a term applied to the whole of that large variety of domestic animals known as the Bovine family. Naturalists have divided them into two primary groups—the hump-backed cattle (Bos Indicus) and the straight-backed cattle (Bos Taurus).
Some naturalists claim that these two groups are really only different varieties of the same species, while others claim that the marked differences in structure, habits and voice are such as would indicate a specific distinction.
The hump-backed variety is chiefly found in India and Africa, while the straight-backed cattle are common in all parts of the globe. Cattle seem to have been domesticated as far back as written and traditional history will take us.
The remains of the cow and the ox have been found as a part of the many evidences of the oldest civilizations, their bones having been discovered in the same caves with stone axes and stone knives. That the cow contributed immensely to the earlier civilizations cannot be doubted. Besides contributing to the daily bill of fare she became the common beast of burden, drawing the rudest of plows, sleds and carts, and in fact she does the same to-day to some extent in many parts of the world.
The common straight-backed cattle, as we know them in our country, remain an important factor even in this stage of civilization; while they are not generally used as beasts of burden, they furnish millions of gallons of milk and numberless pounds of butter, and finally sacrificing their entire bodies to the use of man. The principal part of the body goes to the meat block to become steaks, roasts and soup bones; the refuse flesh going to the manufacture of soaps largely; the hide furnishes most of our leather, the bones become fertilizer, the hoofs and horns make our glue, and lastly, the hair makes it possible for us to live in plastered houses.