4 EXTINCT BRITISH ANIMALS. 
plants. Many a traveller then had cause to rue the 
sudden and unexpected rush of some grand old 
patriarch of the ‘“sownder,’ who, with gnashing 
tusks, charged out upon the invader of his domain, 
occasionally unhorsing him, and not unfrequently 
inflicting severe injuries upon his steed. In the 
wilder recesses of the forest, and amongst the caves 
and boulders of the mountain side, the bear, too, 
had his stronghold, and though exterminated at a 
much earlier period, long co-existed with the animals 
we have named; while in a few favoured localities 
in the west and north, the harmless, inoffensive 
beaver built its dam, and dived in timid haste at the 
approach of an intruder. 
At the present day it is difficult to realize such a 
state of things, unless we consider at the same time 
the aspect and condition of the country in which 
these animals lived, and the remarkable physical 
changes which have since taken place. Nothing 
we have now left can give us any idea of the 
state of things then; not the moors of North 
Derbyshire, West Yorkshire, and Lancashire, the 
wild wastes of Westmoreland, Cumberland, and 
Northumberland, nor even the extensive deer-forests 
and moors of the Scottish Highlands ; for the pathless 
woods which then covered a great part of these dis- 
tricts are all gone, and so also are the thick forests 
which, outside of but connected with them, skirted 
these higher grounds. The advance of man and the 
progress of cultivation has destroyed most of these 
wild woods, but it was not so in late Saxon and in 
