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"Ure-oxen", the auerochs, or European bison, now practically extinct. "Fragrance". It was believed that the odor of the panther attracted the game. Compare the description of the panther in the older "Physiologus", where the odor is said to surpass that of all ointments. "Otter" translates here M.H.G. "ludem", whose exact connotation is not known.

The auerochs survived in Prussia until the middle of the last century, but unless it is identical with a similar quadruped said to be found on the Caucasus, it now exists only in the Russian imperial forest of Bialowitz where about a thousand are still preserved, and in some great menageries, as for example that at Schonbrunn, near Vienna, which, in 1852, had four specimens.

Modern naturalists identify the elk with the eland, the wisent with the auerochs. The period when the ur and the schelk became extinct is not known.

From the anatomical character of the bones of the urus, or auerochs, found among the relics of the lacustrine population of ancient Switzerland, and from other circumstances, it is inferred that this animal had been domesticated by that people; and it is stated, I know not upon what authority, in Le Alpi che cingono l'Italia, that it had been tamed by the Veneti also.

Two large graminivorous or browsing quadrupeds, the ur and the schelk, once common in Germany, have been utterly extirpated, the eland and the auerochs nearly so. Starker ure viere, unt einen grimmen schelch. XVI. Aventiure. The testimony of the Nibelungen-Lied is not conclusive evidence that these quadrupeds existed in Germany at the time of the composition of that poem.

The adventurous hunter spirit which had started such a bemired Auerochs, or Urus of the German woods, and decided on chasing that as game, struck me not a little; and the poor Wood-Ox, so bemired in the forests, took it as a compliment rather: "To Thomas Carlyle, Esq., Chelsea, London. "HERSTMONCEUX near BATTLE, 29th May, 1835.