74 EXTINCT BRITISH ANIMALS. 
hunt ezther Red-deer or Reindeer, or whether, as 
appears to him more likely, the Saga man was under 
the impression that rauddyr and hrein were syno- 
nymous terms.” 
The author of the Saga, says Professor Boyd 
Dawkins, must have been well acquainted with the 
animal in Norway, Sweden, and Iceland, and there 
seems nothing improbable in the natural inference 
that the animal they called reindeer undoubtedly | 
was one. The inclement hills of Caithness lie in the 
same parallel of latitude as the south of Norway and 
Sweden, in which the animal was living at the time ; 
and its food, the brushwood, and especially the rein- 
deer moss (Cladonia rangiferina) is still found exten- 
sively over Scotland. Indeed, the abundance and 
variety of lichens is specially noted as a peculiarity in 
the Statistical Account of the parish of Wick, where 
the reindeer moss is stated to grow to the height of 
three or four inches among the heather. 
The jarls of Orkney referred to (Régnvald and 
Harald), according to Jonzeus, hunted in Caithness 
ih 1150. 
There is another point worth notice, as remarked 
by Professor Boyd Dawkins.t “The Reindeer is men- 
tioned in the Orkneyinga Saga along with the Red- 
deer. At the present day these animals occupy 
different zoological provinces; so that the fact of 
their association in Caithness would show that in the 
twelfth century the Red-deer had already appropriated 
* Alston, “ Fauna of Scotland” (Mammalia), p. 36 (1880). 
+ Popular Science Review, 1868, p. 43. 
