NORTHUMBERLAND AND DURHAM, 14] 
the wild cattle of Chillingham are the descendants of those which 
roamed our hills when the beaver built its dams on our rivers, 
and the bear and the wolf preyed upon the Roe deer in our 
forests. Weare aware that Professor Owen is not of this opinion, 
but believes that the Chillingham cattle are the descendants of 
the domesticated breed introduced into this country by the 
Romans. 
The Highland Kyloes and the Welsh Runts he considers are 
more probably the descendants of the cattle possessed by the 
Britons at the time of the Roman invasion, inhabiting as they 
still do the mountain fastnesses to which the Celtic population 
retired, and these were, he thinks, the descendants of a wild 
British race, probably, identical with the Bos longifrons, whose 
remains occur in the new pliocene strata, in the brick earth de- 
posits, drift gravels, and bone caves. Of small size, and not like 
the Bos primigenius possessed of too formidable powers, they 
would be readily reduced to domesticity by a savage people.* 
The Roman cattle from whence he derives the Chillingham race, 
and our larger domesticated breeds generally, are, he says, de~ 
scendants of the Indian Brahmin cattle (Bos Indicus, Linn.) 
which were procured by the Romans from the Greeks, by the 
Greeks from the Egyptians, and by these from India, probably 
through the intervention of the Syrians or Persians.t This is, 
we think, rather an elaborate and complicated theory to account 
for the existence of wild cattle at Chillingham. The Bos Jndicus 
is usually held to be a distinct species, from Bos Taurus, and if 
the Kyloes and other British races descend from the latter, we 
have at once the long sought for proof of the continued fertility 
of hybridraces. Professor Owen considers that there is a marked 
tendency in the Chillingham cattle to revert to the characteristic 
dewlap of the Indian or Brahmin cattle, and that there are even 
signs of a rudimentary hump as well as other resemblances. On 
the other hand, M. Riitimeyer, an eminent authority, in a treatise 
on the remains found among the “ Lake Habitations” of Switzer- 
land, and on the origin of the present Swiss breeds, states it to 
* Annals Nat. Hist. (1856) vol. xviii, 64. 
+ Professor Owen, Lecture at Newcastle, 1861. 
