by any quadruped save the musk-ox.  The head, neck, and fore quarters are clothed with hide and hair so thick as to be almost, if not entirely, impervious to cold.  The hair on the body and hind quarters is long, fine, very thick, and of that peculiar woolly quality which constitutes the best possible protection against cold.  Let him who doubts the warmth of a good buffalo robe try to weather a blizzard with something else, and then try the robe.  The very form of the buffalo—­short, thick legs, and head hung very near the ground—­suggests most forcibly a special fitness to wrestle with mother earth for a living, snow or no snow.  A buffalo will flounder for days through deep snow-drifts without a morsel of food, and survive where the best range steer would literally freeze on foot, bolt upright, as hundreds did in the winter of 1886-’87.  While range cattle turn tail to a blizzard and drift helplessly, the buffalo faces it every time, and remains master of the situation.

It has for years been a surprise to me that Western stockmen have not seized upon the opportunity presented by the presence of the buffalo to improve the character of their cattle.  Now that there are no longer any buffalo calves to be had on the plains for the trouble of catching them, and the few domesticated buffaloes that remain are worth fabulous prices, we may expect to see a great deal of interest manifested in this subject, and some costly efforts made to atone for previous lack of forethought.

The character of the buffalo-domestic hybrid.—­The subjoined illustration from a photograph kindly furnished by Mr. C. J. Jones, represents a ten months’ old half-breed calf (male), the product of a buffalo bull and domestic cow.  The prepotency of the sire is apparent at the first glance, and to so marked an extent that the illustration would pass muster anywhere as having been drawn from a full-blood buffalo.  The head, neck, and hump, and the long woolly hair that covers them, proclaim the buffalo in every line.  Excepting that the hair on the shoulders (below the hump) is of the same length as that on the body and hind quarters, there is, so far as one can judge from an excellent photograph, no difference whatever observable between this lusty young half-breed and a full blood buffalo calf of the same age and sex.  Mr. Jones describes the color of this animal as “iron-gray,” and remarks:  “You will see how even the fur is, being as long on the hind parts as on the shoulders and neck, very much unlike the buffalo, which is so shaggy about the shoulders and so thin farther back.”  Upon this point it is to be remarked that the hair on the body of a yearling or two year-old buffalo is always very much longer in proportion to the hair on the forward parts than it is later in life, and while the shoulder hair is always decidedly longer than that back of it, during the first two years the contrast is by no means so very great.  A reference to the memoranda of hair measurements already given will afford precise data on this point.