34 WILD WHITE CATTLE 



that of Boyd Dawkins, also on negative rather than positive 

 evidence. He says : 



" There is no record of the urus being found in Great 

 Britain associated with Roman objects or any remains that 

 would show that it lived on later, at any rate, than the 

 Bronze Age. . . . The Bos longifrons or brachyceros, a small 

 ox about the size of a Kerry cow, with small horns sharply 

 curved forward and a considerably elevated ridge between 

 them, was the ox which the Romans found in Britain. Their 

 middens are full of its bones." 



It was most natural that the middens should contain the 

 bones of the domesticated breed, but neither that fact nor the 

 failure to find remains of the ancient wild cattle associated 

 with traces of human existence so as to fix the period of their 

 deposition can discredit the belief in the possibility of the 

 existence of the wild cattle in the forest-clad mountain fast- 

 nesses of Scotland, which were never under Roman control. 



Professor Hughes says of the skull of the urus : 



" The forehead is flat or slightly concave, and the horn- 

 cores bend first out, then forward and downward, and finally 

 the points approach one another with an upward curve. One 

 measured 36 inches in length." 



He holds that the Romans introduced a new breed which 

 modified the small Celtic Shorthorn, and produced some at 

 least of the ancestors of the wild and of the domesticated 

 breeds of later times ; but the argument, based largely on the 

 evidence of Roman coins and on the size (relative length) of 

 the skull and the shape of the horn, is not conclusive to the 

 practical breeder of cattle. As great differences in the length 

 of the face and in the shape of the horn as those which he 

 indicates, and on which he founds his argument, have occurred 

 within the Ayrshire breed within the short space of the last 

 century. The assertion that " in form, the Chillingham and 

 the Highland cattle can hardly be distinguished," is so far 

 from being correct that it alone is sufficient to shake the 

 confidence of those who are unable of their own knowledge to 

 judge of the more subtle and scientific part of the reasoning. 



The suggestion he made in The Times of 3rd December 

 1904, that the white of the wild cattle may have originated 

 from domesticated albinos being let loose among them, is 

 equally irrelevant, as no such thing as an albino appears in 



