78 EXTINCT BRITISH ANIMALS. 
here in turns. Figures of the wild boar are found 
on Roman monuments in England; Pennant has 
noticed one such at Ribchester, formerly a famous 
Roman station. “It is supposed,” he says, “to 
have been an honorary inscription to Severus and 
Caracalla, by the repetition of the address. It was 
done by a vevillatio of one of the legions quartered 
here. A stone fixed in the wall of a small house 
near the church gives room to suppose that it 
belonged to the twentieth. The inscription is 
LEG. XX. W. FEC., and on one side is the 
sculpture of a Boar, an animal I have in two 
other instances observed attendant on the inscrip- 
tions made by the famous Legio vicessima valens 
victriz.”* 
Nor should we omit to notice the Roman altar 
which was found in 1749 near Stanhope, in the 
bishopric of Durham, usually referred to as the Wear- 
dale altar, and dedicated by a grateful Roman prefect 
to the god Sylvanus for the capture of an enormous 
Boar, which many of his predecessors had in vain 
attempted to destroy. On this altar was discovered 
the following inscription :—“ Sy/vano invicto sacrum 
.. 0b Aprum eximiw forme captum, quem multe 
antecessores ejus predart non potuerunt.” A similar 
altar, also dedicated to Sylvanus by the hunters of 
Banna, was found at Birdoswald, in Northumber- 
land.t 
* “Tour to Alston Moor,” 1801, p.93. See also Horsley, “ Bri- 
tannia Romana, or the Roman Antiquities of Britain,” folio, 1732. 
+ Wright, “The Celt, the Roman, and the Saxon,” pp. 207, 267. 
