Crossword-Solution: NIATA 5 letters, 8 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 5

When the pasture is tolerably long, the niata cattle feed with the tongue and palate as well as common cattle; but during the great droughts, when so many animals perish, the niata breed is under a great disadvantage, and would be exterminated if not attended to; for the common cattle, like horses, are able just to keep alive, by browsing with their lips on twigs of trees and reeds; this the niatas cannot so well do, as their lips do not join, and hence they are found to perish before the common cattle.

The Niata cattle in South America show us how small a difference in structure may make, during such periods, a great difference in preserving an animal’s life.

Then follows a comparison between rarity (In the second edition, page 146, the destruction of Niata cattle by droughts is given as a good example of our ignorance of the causes of rarity or extinction.

CATTLE—ZEBU A DISTINCT SPECIES—EUROPEAN CATTLE PROBABLY DESCENDED FROM THREE WILD FORMS—ALL THE RACES NOW FERTILE TOGETHER—BRITISH PARK CATTLE—ON THE COLOUR OF THE ABORIGINAL SPECIES—CONSTITUTIONAL DIFFERENCES—SOUTH AFRICAN RACES—SOUTH AMERICAN RACES—NIATA CATTLE—ORIGIN OF THE VARIOUS RACES OF CATTLE.

Farmyard ungulates, however, had all proved more susceptible to human manipulation, whether through the gradual enhancement of inherent tendencies, such as the relatively early maturation that distinguished shorthorn cattle, or through the preservation of spontaneously arising monstrosities, such as the short, broad foreheads and protruding lower jaws of the niata cattle of South America, the bulldogs of the bovine world.