| 词源 |
buffalo. Most people believe that buffalo is a misnomer, a name applied with zoological inexactitude to the American bi- son. Cortes described the creature as “a rare Mexican bull, with crooked shoulders, a hump on its back like a camel and with hair like a lion,” but later explorers thought it was the Asian or African water buffalo and called it after the Spanish bufalo, al- ready used in Europe as the name for those animals. Actually the water buffalo and the American buffalo both belong to the bison family, so the real mistake of early explorers was in call- ing the native American animal simply buffalo and not qualify- ing it with a name such as prairie buffalo. |