HIPPOPOTAMUSES, PIGS, AND DEER 287 



certainly suggests intermixture with the stocks derived from the 

 wild pigs of Eastern Asia, which are almost devoid of hair. 



The wild boar probably did not become finally extinct in 

 England till the beginning of the seventeenth century. In 1593 

 (as Mr. Harting points out in his book, British Animals Extinct 

 within Historic Times) Erdwick, in his Survey of Staffordshire^ 

 mentions wild swine as existing in the celebrated Forest of 

 Chartley, which still harbours the feral cattle. In 11 74, if not 

 later, there were wild boars in Epping Forest. Wild boar 

 hunts took place in Scotland in the middle of the sixteenth 

 century, and the boar probably lingered on in the Highlands 

 down to the beginning of the seventeenth century, about which 

 period it became extinct in Ireland. It is stated that the 

 Irish wild boar was a somewhat diminutive animal as compared 

 with its brother of Britain and Continental Europe, no doubt 

 through insulation from Europe and interbreeding of the wild 

 stock. Many of them in Ireland, by enclosure of land, seem to 

 have gradually drifted into the condition of semi-domesticated, 

 and finally domesticated, animals. The half-wild pigs in the 

 New Forest at one time had very much the look of diminutive 

 wild boars, but this seems to have been due to the deliberate 

 reintroduction into that forest of wild boars imported by 

 Charles I. But in England, as in Ireland, the last of the wild 

 boars seem to have been enclosed and domesticated rather than 

 exterminated, and in the allusions to boars by the writers of 

 Shakespeare's time it is difficult to ascertain whether they mean 

 the entirely and naturally wild animal or a half-wild pig. Mr. 

 Harting considers that the last truly wild boar became extinct in 

 England as late as 1683, in Staffordshire, and wild boars were 

 killed in Westmoreland a little earlier. King James I. hunted 

 wild boars in Windsor Park in 161 7, in which same year he 

 in his progress through Lancashire feasted on a wild boar pie 

 at a banquet given by Sir Richard Houghton. 



Camels, which originated in North America, and spread 

 thence right across Asia into North Africa, and perhaps to 

 Greece and Italy, never reached England with other specimens 



