VI.  RUMINANTIA. The Gaur.—­Besides the deer, and some varieties of the humped ox, that have been introduced from the opposite continent of India, Ceylon has probably but one other indigenous bovine ruminant, the buffalo.[1] There is a tradition that the gaur, found in the extremity of the Indian peninsula, was at one period a native of the Kandyan Mountains; but as Knox speaks of one which in his time “was kept among the king’s creatures” at Kandy[2], and his account of it tallies with that of the Bos Gaurus of Hindustan, it would appear even then to have been a rarity.  A place between Neuera-ellia and Adam’s Peak bears the name of “Gowra-ellia,” and it is not impossible that the animal may yet be discovered in some of the imperfectly explored regions of the island.[3] I have heard of an instance in which a very old Kandyan, residing in the mountains near the Horton Plains, asserted that when young he had seen what he believed to have been a gaur, and he described it as between an elk and a buffalo in size, dark brown in colour, and very scantily provided with hair.

[Footnote 1:  Bubalus buffelus, Gray.]

[Footnote 2:  KNOX, Historical Relation of Ceylon, &c., A.D. 1681.  Book i. c. 6.]

[Footnote 3:  KELAART, Fauna Zeylan., p. 87.]

Oxen.—­Oxen are used by the peasantry both in ploughing and in tempering the mud in the wet paddi fields before sowing the rice; and when the harvest is reaped they “tread out the corn,” after the immemorial custom of the East.  The wealth of the native chiefs and landed proprietors frequently consists in their herds of bullocks, which they hire out to their dependents during the seasons for agricultural labour; and as they already supply them with land to be tilled, and lend the seed which is to crop it, the further contribution of this portion of the labour serves to render the dependence of the peasantry on the chiefs and headmen complete.

The cows are often worked as well as the oxen; and as the calves are always permitted to suck them, milk is an article which the traveller can rarely hope to procure in a Kandyan village.  From their constant exposure at all seasons, the cattle in Ceylon, both those employed in agriculture and those on the roads, are subject to devastating murrains, that sweep them away by thousands.  So frequent is the recurrence of these calamities, and so extended their ravages, that they exercise a serious influence upon the commercial interests of the colony, by reducing the facilities of agriculture, and augmenting the cost of carriage during the most critical periods of the coffee harvest.

A similar disorder, probably peripneumonia, frequently carries off the cattle in Assam and other hill countries on the continent of India; and there, as in Ceylon, the inflammatory symptoms in the lungs and throat, and the internal derangement and external eruptive appearances, seem to indicate that the disease is a feverish influenza, attributable to neglect and exposure in a moist and variable climate; and that its prevention might be hoped for, and the cattle preserved, by the simple expedient of more humane and considerate treatment, especially by affording them cover at night.