EXTINCT IN BRITAIN WITHIN HISTORIC TI5IES. 15 



animnls. Tlioso specimens have all been preserved either in the 

 Museum of Trinity CoUege, or in the Museum of Science and Art, 

 Dublin. A noteworthy character of the horns is the uniformity of 

 the beam, which is slender and rouiid as in Enplisli specimens, and 

 the existing reindeer of ^Norway, and unlike the flattened antlers 

 of the Siberian stock. 



Having scon what geology teaches with regard to the former 

 existence of the reindeer in this country, wc have now to inquire 

 whether there is any historical evidence of its survival in 

 Britain. There is no record of its having lived in historic times 

 in England and Wales, but in Scotland the case is otherwise. Its 

 last home was in Caithness, and in the ' Orkney inga Saga ' it is 

 related that the Jarls of Orkney were in the habit of crossing over 

 to Caithness every summer, and there hunting in the wilds the red- 

 deer and the reindeer. The passage is thus translated by a learned 

 Icelander, Jonas Jonteus : — 



" Solelant Comites quavis fere (Estate in Katenesum transire, ibique 

 in desert is /eras rubras ct rangiferos venariT 



Torfceus, writing at the end of the seventeenth century, says 

 that the animals hunted were roedeer and reindeer, and renders the 

 passage thus: — " Consueverant Comites in Catenesiam indeque ad mon- 

 tana ad renatum Caprearum Rangiferorum qum q^uotaymis froficisci.'''''^' 



Dr. Hibbert, who has written an elaborate critique on this 

 passage,! agrees with Jonteus in believing that the reindeer was 

 hunted in Scotland by the Jarls of Orkney in the twelfth century. 

 Of the same opinion also is Professor Brandt. 



The authors of the * Saga,'' says Prof. Boyd Dawkins, must have 

 been well acquainted with the animal in Norway, Sweden, and 

 Iceland ; and there seems nothing improbable in the natural infer- 

 ence that the animal they called reindeer was undoubtedly one. 

 The inclement hills of Caithness lie in the same parallel of lati- 

 tude as the south of Norway and Sweden, in which the animal Avas 

 living at the time ; reindeer-moss is abundant there, and the only 

 condition of life which is wanting to make that country still habit- 

 able by it is a greater severity of cold. He is disposed, therefore, 

 to admit the fact that the reindeer lived in Caithness at the time 

 that Henry the Second occupied the throne of England, and 

 Alexander Neckham was writing his Natural History. There is 

 another point which is well worthy of notice. The animal is 

 mentioned in the ' Saga ' along with the red-deer. At the present 

 day they occupy different zoological provinces, so that the fact 

 of their association in Caithness would show that in the twelfth 

 century the red-deer had already appropriated the pastures of the 

 reindeer, which could not retreat further north on account of the 

 sea, and was verging on extinction. Prom Linnajus' time down 

 to the present day, even in Sweden and Norway, it has been 

 retreating further and further north. 



^o 



* ' Eerum Orcadensium Historisc,' lib. i, cap. xxvi. 



t Brewster's ' Edinb. Jonm. Science,' N.S. vol. v, p. 50. 



