732 APPENDIX. 



to think on the one hand as regards literature, that poetical writers 

 would have omitted to use for illustration the habits and bearing 1 

 and peculiarities of a creature which all later poets, gnomic and 

 other, have so constantly and multifariously alluded to ; and on 

 the other as regards excavations, that an animal which Captain 

 Cook found in occupation of Polynesia, from Tahiti to the Sandwich 

 Islands, and which has since been adopted everywhere, even by 

 the non-progressive Indians of the Amazons (see Bates, I. <?., ii. 

 193), and ' by remote tribes on rivers rarely visited by white men/ 

 would have been missing in them if it had existed on the spots 

 at the period concerned. There is of course no question that the 

 common fowl was known to if not used by the Britons when Caesar 

 made his short acquaintance with them and found that ' Leporem 

 et gallinam et anserem gustare fas non putant ; haec tamen alunt 

 animi voluptatisque caussa.' (See De Bello Gallico, v. 12.) 



Nor, on the other had, does the discovery of the bones of Gallus 

 as described by Alphonse Milne Edwards (Reliquiae Aquitanicse, 

 p. 241) in association with 'those of Ursus spelseus, Rhinoceros, 

 and large Felis' in the caves tenanted by palaeolithic man make 

 it at all more likely that the bird has, any more than the mammals, 

 been continuously represented upon that area since those times 

 down to those of Caesar and ours. The struggle for existence 

 with rival animals, to say nothing of that to be waged against 

 inorganic forces, may well have exiled and exterminated during 

 the neolithic age animals which the men of the bronze and iron 

 have found it their pleasure or their interest to introduce again, 

 or which may themselves have succeeded in reoccupying their lost 

 territories. The history of the fallow deer, and possibly those of 

 the rabbit and horse, might, if we could read them out of the records 

 in the soil, illustrate this principle, just as the recent history of the 

 capercailzie, Tetrao urogallus, does. 



On the other hand, though M. Alphonse Milne Edwards (I.e., 

 pp. 243-247) appears to think otherwise, I should incline to think 

 the Crane, Grus cinereus, may have occupied this country con- 

 show themselves so sensible of the advantages derivable from the ox, sheep, and hog, 

 all of which have been introduced into their country/ Few Englishmen will be found 

 to agree in Guizot's comparison (Hist. Civ. Franc., lect. vii. torn, i., cit. Merivale, 

 Conversion of the Northern Nations, p. 185) of their Anglo-Saxon forefathers' condi- 

 tion, social and political, to that of the modern Red Indians ; still as against Link's 

 principle quoted above it is worth while to recollect that they, in the words of Mr. 

 Thrupp (/. c. p. 172), ' kept as pets and probably attempted to domesticate ' ravens, 

 rooks, cranes, and peacocks. 



