296 MOSTLY MAMMALS 



as there was no species to which it could possibly apply 

 save the bison, which then still survived in Poland and 

 elsewhere, it was transferred to that animal, of which, as 

 already mentioned, it became the common designation. 

 A precisely analogous instance has occurred in Eastern 

 Russia. The bison, in place of being restricted, as now, 

 to Lithuania and the Caucasus, was formerly much more 

 widely distributed. When it disappeared from certain 

 districts, its name still survived, and became transferred 

 by the peasants to the eastern race of the red-deer, 

 as the only large wild ungulate with which they were 

 acquainted. 



As regards the gradual extermination of the aurochs 

 as a wild animal during the Middle Ages, much important 

 evidence has been collected of late years by Messrs. Nehring 

 and Schiemenz. 



During the Pleistocene epoch, when the mammoth and 

 the woolly rhinoceros inhabited the British Islands and 

 the Continent (which were then one), the aurochs was a 

 common animal, as is attested by the abundance of its 

 remains in formations of that age. Some of the finest 

 and largest skulls of this so-called Bos primigenius were 

 obtained by the late Sir Antonio Brady from the brick-earths 

 of Ilford, in Essex. Other skulls have been obtained from 

 the peat of Perthshire, from Burwell Fen, Cambridgeshire, 

 and from a peaty deposit at Newbury, in Berkshire. A 

 skull from Burwell Fen, in the Woodwardian Museum at 

 Cambridge, has a flint implement embedded in the fore- 

 head, thus showing that the animal was hunted by the 

 prehistoric inhabitants of our islands at a time when the 

 mammoth and rhinoceros had already disappeared. 



As to the date of the extermination of the wild aurochs 

 in Britain there is no decisive evidence, but no skulls or 



