GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION OF ANIMALS 1543 



These are but few instances of the way in which 

 human agency modifies the distribution of animal 

 life. On the continent, the extermination of a par- 

 ticular species is of course more difficult; in numer- 

 ous cases is perhaps altogether impossible. The wolf 

 inhabits the forests of continental Europe, from the 

 high tracts that adjoin the Alps and the Pyrenees 

 northward to the shores of the Baltic and White Seas. 

 The wild boar and the bear (three species of the lat- 

 ter the brown and the black in the wooded regions 

 of the south, the white polar bear in the extreme 

 north) are still met with. The urus or wild ox of 

 the Lithuanian forests, regarded by naturalists as the 

 progenitor of our common domestic cattle, is even 

 yet found to the eastward of the Baltic. 



Europe, however, has no one of the great families 

 of mammalia that can be looked on as peculiarly its 

 own, or, in other words, as giving it a distinctive 

 zoology like the antelopes of Southern and Western 

 Asia, the numerous pachyderms of the African con- 

 tinent ,the llama tribe of the New World, or the mar- 

 supials of Australia. Of the total number of Euro- 

 pean mammalia, not exceeding a hundred and eighty, 

 only fifty-eight are peculiar to this continent, and 

 none of the larger quadrupeds is included among 

 them. 



The domesticated animals that are so numerously 

 reared in every part of Europe have probably been, 

 in most cases, derived from indigenous species. The 

 urus or wild ox has been the parent of the common 

 ox, and the wild boar of the domestic pig; the goat, 

 and, in the extreme north, the reindeer, are also na- 



