100 EXTINCT BRITISH ANIMALS. 
preliminary “chop” or two, dashed at it. The 
viper seemed to strike him two or three times on 
the snout, but the boar, putting one foot on him,. 
pulled him to pieces in a few seconds, and certainly 
did not suffer any subsequent inconvenience from 
the viper’s attacks. Jack and Dick (the two black 
boars) died natural deaths, and their successors de- 
generated in size, and seemed gradually to become 
tame and spiritless; they have been extinct for 
forty years or so. The old red boar lived for some 
years confined in a large yard, and at enmity with 
everyone; a more untameable animal there could 
not be. He came to an undignified end, being fed. 
and killed like his tame brethren. After death he 
was skinned and stuffed, and when I last saw him 
he was in the lumber room at the Priory, near 
Derby, and, like the celebrated wolf killed by the 
deerhound Gelert, he was ‘tremendous still in 
death.” The head of one of his grandsons is or was 
in the Derby Museum, and a formidable-looking 
object it is, with immense tusks. This descendant 
died from eating a poisoned rat which had been 
thoughtlessly thrown to him. 
“‘The very last of the Sydnope boars was shot in 
the year 1837, and the fact was recorded in verse, 
by one of the party, very humorously and success- 
fully.” 
The exact date of the extinction of the Wild Boar 
in Britain 1s uncertain. 
There were Wild Boars in Durham in 1531-33. 
In the Accounts of the Bursar of the Monastery of 
