Still, even the stags have times in the year, before their antlers are grown, when they are comparatively defenceless. There remains yet another branch of the “ruminant” family, even better provided with weapons. These are the antelopes, wild cattle, and buffaloes, for with them the horns never fall off. The reason of this is that they grow in quite a different manner from the stags’ antlers. Instead of the bone being laid down by the skin, it grows out as a core from the forehead, and the skin over it hardens into horn as it grows, so that the tip of a bull’s horns is the oldest part. [Illustration: Fig. 71. A Buffalo cow defending her calf.--(Livingstone.)] Here then we can have no branching as in the stag, but on the other hand a firm and terrible weapon increasing from year to year; and even the king of the beasts, the lion, when he attacks a large buffalo, is often seriously wounded for his pains. We should not wonder then if these animals had conquered the world wherever man had not destroyed them; but strange to say, they have kept chiefly to the old world, for none have travelled to South America, and only the Bisons have overrun North America with their vast herds. All the rest, buffaloes, wild cattle, antelopes, gazelles, goats and sheep, have made their home in Europe, Asia, and Africa, and a fine time they must have had of it when all Europe was one field of undulating plains and dense forests, and the ancestors of our cattle crashed through the tangled bushes, drank by the silent rivers, or grazed on the wild rough herbage. Then, where town and villages now stand, there must have been scenes such as travellers still relate of Central Africa, where amid dense jungle, magnificent forests, and flat marshy grounds, “... the elephant browses at peace in his wood, And the river-horse gambols unscared in the flood, And the mighty rhinoceros wallows at will, In the fen where the wild ass is drinking his fill.” There the huge buffaloes come down in troops out of the forest to drink, while the great hippopotamuses leave their watery bed to feed on the rough grass of the swamps. Not far off, a herd of zebras comes galloping by to drink lower down in the river, startling the large antelopes feeding quietly in the soft green pasture above, for they know that this is the hour when the lions are abroad and will fall upon any straggler with tooth and nail, while the distant howling of the hyænas shows that they would not be far behind in seizing upon any weak or wounded animal. But little does the heavy rhinoceros care for all this as he too tramps slowly along on his way to drink, for with his size and defences he runs but little risk of attack. Thus all the country is alive with large milk-givers, and we realise that when they ruled all over the world, as they still do in Africa, they too must have had their time of triumph and greatness like the great fish or the monster reptiles.