X. 
BOS LONGIFRONS, 
BY 
CAPTAIN McDAKIN, 
Read JANUARY 7th, 1885. 
The -president, Captain McDakin, exhibited some skulls of 
oxen, which Mr. Dean, of St. Mildred’s, Canterbury, had rescued 
from being shot into a gravel pit on his property at the Martyr’s 
Field, near L. C. & D. Railway Station. Curiously the same pit 
from whence were obtained the molar teeth of the extinct elephant 
(Hlephas Antiquus) exhibited on a former occasion in 1881. 
The skulls were found by the workmen engaged in digging 
the foundations of the London and County Bank, in the High 
Street, at a depth of 15 feet below the surface. The soil is said to 
have been a dark silt and apparently undisturbed. From the 
peculiar curvature of the horns (especially in the case of the 
2 smaller specimen) there is little doubt but that they belong to the 
ancient British ox, named the Bos longifrons. The other two 
specimens could not be classified with certainty. Mr. Boyd 
_ Dawkins states that the Bos longifrons was not found at an earlier 
_ period than that known as the Neolithic or polished stone imple- 
ment period, and we do not find it more recently than the close of 
the Roman period. It occurs in Ireland in the peat bogs with the 
Trish Elk and with the Reindeer, and it has been found in some 
parts of England with the remains of the Beaver. It has also been 
found with Roman pottery in the neighbourhood of London. 
Mr. Wright, in his excellent book called ‘Celt, Saxon, 
and Roman,” mentions the Bos longifrons having been found at a 
Roman villa, at Hartlip, in Kent. 
Oxen of this variety are regarded as those from which the 
ancient Britons obtained their principal supply of meat previously 
to the time of the Roman invasion, and during the greater part of 
the Roman period. Curiously enough, after the Saxons came, the 
ancient Britons not only fled before the Saxons into the moun- 
_ tainous parts of Wales and the Highlands, but they carried with 
them these small short horned cattle. At least, we judge from the 
absence of their remains with those of Saxon antiquities that they 
< disappeared from the country just at the time of the invasion of the 
Saxon barbarians, who introduced a larger breed of oxen to furnish 
in time the roast beef of Old England, and thus to supplant the 
- roast beef of Older Britain. 
The small short horned cattle of Wales and southern Scotland 
are supposed to be the descendants of the Bos longifrons. 
The skulls have been placed in the Canterbury Museum. 
