In all the wild species of goats and sheep the horns are larger in the male than in the female, and are sometimes quite absent in the latter.[299] In several domestic breeds of the sheep and goat, the males alone are furnished with horns; and it is a significant fact, that in one such breed of sheep on the Guinea coast, the horns are not developed, as Mr. Winwood Reade informs me, in the castrated male; so that they are affected in this respect like the horns of stags. In some breeds, as in that of N. Wales, in which both sexes are properly horned, the ewes are very liable to be hornless. In these same sheep, as I have been informed by a trustworthy witness who purposely inspected a flock during the lambing-season, the horns at birth are generally more fully developed in the male than in the female. With the adult musk-ox (_Ovibos moschatus_) the horns of the male are larger than those of the female, and in the latter the bases do not touch.[300] In regard to ordinary cattle Mr. Blyth remarks: “In most of the wild bovine animals the horns are both longer and thicker in the bull than in the cow, and in the cow-banteng (_Bos sondaicus_) the horns are remarkably small, and inclined much backwards. In the domestic races of cattle, both of the humped and humpless types, the horns are short and thick in the bull, longer and more slender in the cow and ox; and in the Indian buffalo, they are shorter and thicker in the bull, longer and more slender in the cow. In the wild gaour (_B. gaurus_) the horns are mostly both longer and thicker in the bull than in the cow.”[301] Hence with most sheath-horned ruminants the horns of the male are either longer or stronger than those of the female. With the _Rhinoceros simus_, as I may here add, the horns of the female are generally longer but less powerful than in the male; and in some other species of rhinoceros they are said to be shorter in the female.[302] From these various facts we may conclude that horns of all kinds, even when they are equally developed in both sexes, were primarily acquired by the males in order to conquer other males, and have been transferred more or less completely to the female, in relation to the force of the equal form of inheritance.