If it be asked, whether the aurochs or the bison be the primitive race of oxen, a satisfactory answer may be drawn from the facts we have just laid down. The hunch of the bison is, as it has been observed, no more than an accidental character, which is defaced and lost in the mixture of the two kinds. The aurochs, or ox without a hunch, is, then, the most powerful and predominant kind; if it were otherwise, the hunch, instead of disappearing, would extend and remain upon every one of this mixt breed. Besides, this hunch of the bison, like that of the camel, is less the production of Nature than the effect of labour, and the mark of slavery. From time immemorial, in almost every quarter of the globe, the ox has been obliged to carry burdens; the habitual, and often excessive load, has deformed their backs; and this deformity has been afterwards propagated through generations. Undeformed oxen are no longer to be seen, but in those countries where they have not made use of them as beasts of burden. In all Africa, and in the eastern continent, the oxen are hunched, occasioned by their having always carried loads on their shoulders. In Europe, where they are only employed for draught, they have not undergone this deformed alteration, which in the first place probably proceeds from the compression of the loads, and in the second from the abundance of food; for it disappears when the animal is lean and poorly fed. Some enslaved and hunched oxen might have escaped or been abandoned in the woods, and where their posterity would be loaded with the same deformity, which, far from disappearing, may have encreased by the abundance of food peculiar to uncultivated countries, so that this second breed would spread over all the desart lands of the north and south, and pass into the New Continent, like other animals, whose nature can support the cold. What still more confirms the identity of the species of the bison and aurochs, is, the bisons of North America have so strong a smell, that they have been called _Musk Oxen_ by most travellers; and, at the same time, we find, by the accounts of many persons, that the aurochs, or wild ox of Prussia and Livonia, has the same scent of musk.