The fact that likeness of structure, which compels naturalists to group certain animals into a family in spite of possible unlikeness in size or form, is accompanied by resemblance in quality, is well illustrated by the family BovidÆ (Latin boves, "cattle") which includes goats, sheep, antelopes, and oxen; for all of these in flesh, products and disposition, are alike suited to the requirements of men, and especially of mankind in a social civilization. This family of animals furnishes us with nearly all of our milk, butter, and cheese; with flesh food, woolen clothing, leather goods, horn, gelatin, etc.: and gives us such servants as the ox and goat; while sportsmen find in it the most fascinating of their larger game.

The distinctive feature of this most useful of animal tribes is the possession of hollow horns, properly so called. Horn is a chitinous material developed from the skin, and not dissimilar to hair; indeed it would be no great stretch of facts to say that a cow's horn was composed of agglutinated hairs. These horns are sheaths that grow over cores of bone—outgrowths of the skull—increase in size until their wearers are mature, grow at the base as fast as worn at the tips, and are never shed. They may be borne by the males alone, or by both sexes; or the males may have horns far larger than those of the female, as in the sheep; and in a few cases both sexes are hornless. No family is more difficult to subdivide, for the various forms intergrade inextricably.

Our mountain goat, or "mazama," which dwells on the snowy heights of the Pacific Coast ranges, from southern British Columbia to farthest Alaska, is one of these intermediate ones, suggesting both goat and antelope in its make-up. It is about the size of an ordinary domestic goat, has small, sharp, black horns, and is clothed in long white hair with an undercoat of wool fitting it for the wintry cold in which its life is spent, for except in midwinter it never comes below timber line, and even then avoids the wooded places. In the rough mountains of Japan lives a similar goat antelope, woolly, but not white; and the lofty heights of western China is the home of a smaller one, the goral, and the Himalayas have the big serow. All these have short, sharp horns rising from the top of the skull. Their nearest western neighbor is the famous chamois of the Alps and Carpathians of Europe. The extraordinary agility of these mountaineers is possible because of the pads beneath their hoofs that give them the clinging surefootedness which is so remarkable.

Most closely allied to them, probably, are the goats, also denizens of mountain regions, the typical species being confined to the highlands between the Caucasus and northwestern India. This is the true goat from which the domestic goat is descended; but the long-haired "Angora" goat is derived from the markhor, a sheeplike animal of the Himalayas with tall, much twisted horns. One of the special characteristics of the goats (genus Capra) is the beard of the rams; and this feature belongs also to the ibexes, several similar species of which are found from the Pyrenees eastward along the mountain tops to northern China, each occupying a limited section of country, and one inhabiting the mountains about the head of the Red Sea. That of Spain is called "bouquetin," and that of the Alps "steinbok." All the rams possess great horns, sometimes fifty inches long, that rise from the occiput, curve backward, and show on their fronts a series of prominent cross ridges. One passes from these goats to their near relatives, the sheep, by way of the "bharal" (or "burrel") which combines the characteristics of the two sections so thoroughly that the proverbial "separating the sheep from the goats," easy enough on the farm, is practically impossible among wild flocks. In this crag-loving wanderer the horns of the rams are as long as those of an ibex, but roundish and wide spreading, instead of upright and cross-ridged. The "aoudad," whose home is in the mountains of Morocco and Algiers, and which is familiar in menageries, has such horns, but approaches nearer in other respects to the typical sheep, whose rams carry the great spiral horns at the side of the head, that are still the pride of our domestic merinos, and were the badge of the Theban god of gods, Ra Ammon. No better example of these magnificent mountaineers, which under one or another of several specific and local names, such as argali, oorial, etc., are, or were, to be found on rough highlands all the way from the Mediterranean to Bering Sea, can be shown than our own "bighorn" sheep of the Rocky Mountains, and of the mountains of Canada and Alaska.

Now we come to the great and beautiful section of the antelopes, in which naturalists recognize thirty-five genera and perhaps a hundred species. Antelopes were scattered in Pleistocene days all over continental Europe and Asia, but never were present in America, for our so-called "antelope" is a pronghorn, as has been explained. Two or three species now inhabit the plains of central Asia—among them the swiftest mammal known, the Mongolian "orongo." The ungainly "nilgai" and the little "black buck" are familiar in India, and the pretty dorcas gazelle races across the sands of Syria and Arabia; but the vast majority of antelopes belong to Africa. They range in size from the duikerboks, not much bigger than fox terriers, to the eland, which has almost the bulk of an ox, and should be domesticated, like beef cattle, for its excellent flesh. No handsomer mammals than antelopes exist, judged by either form or coloring. They inhabit all sorts of country, too, as in other lands do the deer, of which Africa has none. Deserts, such as the Sahara and the Kalahari, and the stony steppes of Somaliland, support not only the swift and agile gazelles, but several large kinds. The grassy plains of South Africa were formerly, and to some extent still are, the pastures of great herds of such antelopes, large and small, as blesboks, wildebeests (or "gnus"), hartebeests, steinboks, springboks, and many others. Springboks used to assemble at certain seasons, and migrate across the veldt in countless thousands, allowing nothing to stop the headlong rush of the host. The thick jungle is the refuge of the harnessed antelopes, and of several diminutive kinds rarely seen in the open; and along the watercourses, and in marshes, live the big red waterbucks, the shy sitatungas, whose feet are curiously modified to fit them to walk on boggy ground; while rocky hills are the chosen home of the klipspringers and duikerboks, agile pygmies that creep about among the brush like big rabbits, or leap from rock to rock like miniature goats. A score or more of the species of these beautiful creatures have been carelessly or wantonly exterminated, and many others have become rare, but protective laws are now in force in all the parts of Africa controlled by the Government of South Africa, or organized as British, French, or Belgian dependencies.

The quaint and complex musk ox, a lone relic of a past era now exiled to the remotest north, is a connecting link between the sheep and the cattle, the last and best of the ruminants. Here, as elsewhere, the style of the horns is characteristic of the group—slender, backward curved or twisted, and somewhat compressed or keeled, in most antelopes; heavy, cross-ridged, triangular in section and often spiral in the sheep and goats; rough and helmetlike in the musk ox and some buffaloes; and in the oxen round, smooth and always springing from the side of the skull. The cattle fall into three groups: buffaloes, bisons, and oxen.

The buffaloes are tropical cattle, usually heavily built, with massive, flattened, wrinkled horns, and the hair so thin that in old animals the bluish black skin is left almost naked. The typical buffalo is that native to India and Ceylon, where it formerly roved in herds, which, quickly forming into a compact bunch, heads and horns out, defied attack from even the lion or tiger. Bulls often exceed five feet in height, are extremely strong and quick, and carry rough horns, sweeping back circularly, which may measure twelve feet around the curve. Such a veteran herdmaster spends his days wallowing in marshy jungles, his broad, splayed hoofs sustaining him in the muddy soil, and his hairless back, coated with clay, proof against insects; but evenings and mornings he leads his band out to feed in lush prairies where the grass is tall enough to hide them. This is the race that has supplied the working cattle of hot, swampy regions, especially where rice is grown, and that has been the farmer's servant in the Far East, in Egypt, and in parts of Spain and Italy from time immemorial. Several breeds have been developed, of which the best known to Americans is the carabao of the Philippines. Africa has native buffaloes in two species, neither of which has been domesticated. The African buffalo is regarded as perhaps the most dangerous brute a sportsman can meet in that land of irritable beasts. Only rarely will even the lion attack one single-handed, and then seldom succeeds.

The bisons, although regarded by systemists as of two species, the North American "buffalo" and the European "wissent," are as nearly alike as well can be. The latter originally ranged over all Europe, and was necessarily a forest animal, and hence never could assemble into herds as did its American cousins. It has been protected on the Czar's and other great estates in Lithuania and Russia, to the number of about 700; but these preserves were ravaged during and after the World War. The wanton waste that swept away the millions of our American bison in a few short years would long ago have exterminated this species also had it not been preserved in bands here and there in the West and in various animal collections. The peculiarity of the bison is the massive, humplike strength of the fore quarters, the great mop of hair upon them and about the head, and the short, stout horns growing straight out of the side of the head.

The animal called "bison" by sportsmen in India is the gaur, one of four species of true oxen inhabiting southeastern Asia—heavy animals with massive, upcurved horns, a long, ridgelike spine, short tail, and fine, glossy, dark-colored hair. A big bull of the gaur or "sladang," as Malays call it, will stand six feet tall at the shoulders, and is one of the greatest game animals of the world in every sense of the word. Celebes has a curious dwarf ox, the "anoa," which is hardly bigger than a goat. Contrasted with this is the great ungainly yak of Tibet and the high Himalayas, where it still wanders in a wild state, although large herds are kept by the Tibetans as beasts of burden in a region where hardly any other large grazer can exist. Finally, the Orient is the home of an extraordinary race of ancient domestic animals, the white, humped cattle of India, of which many breeds exist, modified by local conditions and purposes, and prehistorically used in Egypt and probably southward. No wild animals of its kind exist, and we know nothing of the origin of the race.

We now come to the most interesting species of the family, now extinct as a wild animal, but perfectly traceable—the primitive wild ox of Europe, the original of our farm cattle. It was much larger than any modern breed, and bore immense, wide-spreading horns, as still do certain coarse breeds in southern Europe, and especially in Spain, whence the herds of long-horned cattle of America were derived. Old bulls were black, but there is reason to suspect that the cows and calves may have been red. This great animal roamed throughout Europe and western Asia, and was counted among the fiercest of game in CÆsar's time, who found it called "ur," or "aurochs"; the former word was Latinized as urus, and the latter, when this ox had disappeared, became transferred to the bison. Even in Roman times the wild ox was growing scarce, and it died out early in the seventeenth century. Meanwhile, from prehistoric days, calves have been tamed by the peasantry, and such cattle as Europe and the Mediterranean basin generally possessed were until quite recently little better than rough descendants of this captured stock.

The so-called "wild white cattle" preserved in various British parks are, according to Lydekker, albino descendants of the tamed native black aurochs stock, of unknown antiquity, and are kept white (with blackish or reddish ears and muzzles) by weeding out the dark-colored calves which occasionally appear; but do not represent the original aurochs as well as do the Welsh breed preserved in Pembroke since prehistoric days. These park cattle are all of moderate size, elegantly shaped, with soft hair, white, black-tipped horns of moderate length, and many wild traits.