No bovine animals of the true taurine race are now known to exist in an aboriginally wild state; but at the epoch of our earliest historical knowledge of central and western Europe it was far otherwise. Cæsar, describing, under the name of _Urus_, certain wild oxen of the great Hercynian forest, says, "These Uri are little inferior to elephants in size, but are bulls in their nature, colour, and figure. Great is their strength, and great their swiftness, nor do they spare man or beast when once they have caught sight of him. These, when trapped in pitfalls, the hunters unsparingly kill. The youths, exercising themselves by this sort of hunting, are hardened by the toil, and those among them who have killed most, bringing with them the horns, as testimonials, acquire great praise. But these Uri cannot be habituated to man, nor made tractable, not even when taken young. The great size of the horns, as well as the form and quality of them, differs much from those of our oxen." It is probable that this race extended widely over Europe, and even into Asia. Herodotus mentions Macedonian wild oxen, with exceedingly large ([Greek: hypermegathia]) horns; and Philip of Macedon killed a wild bull in Mount Orbela, which had made great havoc, and produced much terror among the inhabitants; its spoils he hung up in the Temple of Hercules. The Assyrian artists delighted to sculpture on the royal bas-reliefs of Nineveh the conquest of the wild bull by the prowess of their Nimrod monarchs, and the figures, in their minute anatomical characters, well agree with the descriptions and remains of the European _Urus_. The large forest that surrounded ancient London was infested with _boves sylvestres_ among other wild beasts, and it is probable that these were _Uri_. The legendary exploit of Guy, Earl of Warwick, in freeing the neighbourhood from a terrible dun cow, whether historically true or not, shews the existence of formidable wild bovines in the heart of England, and the terror they inspired among the people. The family of Turnbull, in Scotland, are traditionally said to owe their patronymic to a hero who turned a wild bull from Robert the Bruce, when it had attacked him while hunting. What has become of the terrible Uri which lived in Europe at the commencement of the Christian era? Advancing civilisation has rooted them out, so that no living trace of them remains, unless the cream-white breed which is preserved in a semi-wild state in some of our northern parks be their representatives; or, as is not improbable, their blood may still circulate in our domestic oxen.