The domestic animals of the Masai are oxen, goats, sheep, donkeys, and dogs. Fowls they despise and do not keep. Their cattle absorb all their thoughts. For their possession and retention wars are waged. The gift of an ox is a sign of solemn peacemaking, and is generally accompanied by much spitting right and left of the men who lead it. Nearly all their rites and superstitions are connected with cattle. They believe that they are the lawful heritage of the Masai race, whose primal ancestor received from Naiterkob the power to tame the wild oxen of the woods; and under this impression they “lift” the cattle of all weaker nations, maintaining that they have no right to their possession. Nevertheless, they probably got their kine from their northern home, somewhere on the White Nile, for the generic word they use for cow and cattle is identical with that of the Bari people round Gondokoro, and related to similar terms in the Šiluk and Diṅka tongues (_vide_ Vocabulary). The only type of ox which I have seen in their possession is that humped Asiatic breed (the zebu), so common in Tropical Africa, and which probably owes its introduction to the ancient Egyptians. But I am informed that farther in the interior to the eastward of Kilima-njaro, there is another breed of cattle in the possession of these people—a breed like the oxen of the Cape and South-west Africa, with large bodies, no hump, and immense widespread horns. On the Kunene river (South-west Africa, latitude 17° S.) I have met with the two breeds side by side—the big, long-horned and the small, humped cattle. In Angola there is a mingling of the two. On the Gold Coast and the Oil rivers I have only seen the small, humped variety, though I am told farther inland the other appears. Whence this long-horned, straight-backed, large-sized ox (which is normally a dun-brown) came from, I am at a loss to say. Of course it was not African in its origin, as in Africa there is not, nor, as far as we know, has there been, a wild ox of the genus Bos. Yet this last breed—which much resembles the Hungarian and South European (Spanish) cattle, was evidently an early introduction into Africa, for in many districts it appears to have preceded the humped kind. It was the only breed the Hottentots possessed. It seems to be very much kept by the populous nations in the interior of South Central Africa, between the Congo and Zambezi. The Masai have a word for the pig which is also common to their distant relatives on the Nile (_vide_ Vocabulary), but they do not keep it in a domestic condition. The term for pig is used to indicate the wild warthog (_Phacochœrus_).