THE REINDEER. 303 



referred to, however, could hardly be accepted as conclusive 

 by itself, especially as long as no traces of reindeer had been 

 found among the ancient ruins which abound in that district. 

 On the other hand, since the last edition of this work was 

 published, Mr. J. A. Smith has carefully examined the horns 

 r. i d bones found in the ruins of the curious towers known as 

 "Brochs," or "Burghs," and has shown that some of them 

 certainly belonged to the reindeer.* Thus fragments of rein- 

 deer's horns have been collected by Mr. Joass among the 

 ruins of the Cill-Trolla Broch, on the farm of Kintradwell, 

 near Brora, on the sea-coast of Sutherlandshire. Mr. Smith, 

 on carefully examining the remains of deer obtained by Mr. 

 Laing at Keiss, in Caithness, finds that they do not all belong, 

 as at first supposed, to the red deer, but that some of them 

 were those of the reindeer. Lastly, remains of this species have 

 been collected by Mr. Anderson in the ruins of the Yarhouse 

 Broch, in the same county. It is indeed more than probable 

 that in other cases remains of the reindeer have been incor- 

 rectly ascribed to the red deer. 



We do not, unfortunately, know the date at which these 

 Burghs or Brochs were first constructed, but it is on record 



o * 



that some of them were in use down to the twelfth century 

 (see ante, pp. 58, 59). 



No doubt these observations strongly support the infer- 

 ence derived from the statement of Torfceus, and though I 

 am not entirely convinced, it must be admitted that there 

 are strong grounds for believing that the reindeer survived in 



o o o 



northern Scotland down to a comparatively recent period. 



The true Arctic Fox has also been found in English bone- 

 caves. Indeed, in the Kesserloch cave in Switzerland, out 

 of 150 lower jaws of foxes, only two belonged to our Common 

 Fox, 66 to the Arctic Fox (Canis lagopus), and the remainder 



* Proc. Soc. Anticj. Scot, 1869, vol. viii. p. 186. 



