worth. The hunters who slew him were from the very beginning so absorbed
in the scramble for spoils that they had no time to measure or weigh
him, nor even to notice the majesty of his personal appearance on his
native heath.

In captivity he fails to develop as finely as in his wild state, and
with the loss of his liberty he becomes a tame-looking animal. He gets
fat and short-bodied, and the lack of vigorous and constant exercise
prevents the development of bone and muscle which made the prairie
animal what he was.

From observations made upon buffaloes that have been reared in
captivity, I am firmly convinced that confinement and
semi-domestication are destined to effect striking changes in the form
of _Bison americanus_. While this is to be expected to a certain extent
with most large species, the changes promise to be most conspicuous in
the buffalo. The most striking change is in the body between the hips
and the shoulders. As before remarked, it becomes astonishingly short
and rotund, and through liberal feeding and total lack of exercise the
muscles of the shoulders and hindquarters, especially the latter, are
but feebly developed.

The most striking example of the change of form in the captive buffalo
is the cow in the Central Park Menagerie, New York. Although this animal
is fully adult, and has given birth to three fine calves, she is small,
astonishingly short-bodied, and in comparison with the magnificently
developed cows taken in 1886 by the writer in Montana, she seems almost
like an animal of another species.

Both the live buffaloes in the National Museum collection of living