APPENDIX. 741 



As regards the ox, Bos taurus, I have little to add to what has 

 been written by others with the much larger stores available to 

 their hands which the Swiss pile-dwellings and other habitations 

 of the living prehistoric man have furnished. Riitimeyer, Fauna 

 des Pfahlbauten, p. 127, and Naumann in his interesting memoir, 

 Archiv fur Anthropologie, viii. 1, 1875, p. 30, suggest that the 

 variety of ox known in this country as Bos longifrons, and known 

 abroad more correctly as regards structure, if not more conve- 

 niently as regards the appropriation of the name, as Bos brachyceros, 

 is probably the oldest domestic animal with which we are ac- 

 quainted. The older zoologists held (see Buffon, Hist. Nat. xi. 

 312, ed. 1755), perhaps rather as an article of faith than as the 

 result of enquiry, that ' on a soumis le brebis et le che~vre avant 

 d'avoir dompte le cheval, le boeuf ou le chameau.' The dog and 

 the pig have on the grounds of their present and their pristine 

 distribution in space, of their readiness to attach themselves to 



picions hinted at in the text, and with the view that our domestic animals, though 

 coming in the ultimate resort from the East, like nephrite and jade in the stone-, and 

 bronze probably in the bronze-period, did not reach the regions north of the Alps 

 directly from the East, but only by passing northwards from the Greek and Italian 

 peninsulas. For the goat, as has been repeatedly observed from the time of Aristotle 

 (Hist. An. ix. 4) down to the present, bears cold less well than the sheep, whilst every 

 traveller in sunburnt barren countries may observe with gratitude and wonder what 

 copious supplies of milk are obtained from it, often off but limited areas in these 

 surroundings, and from but shrubs and weeds. The sheep on the other hand, is, as its 

 resting-places on the ' Schatten-seite ' of a mountain show us, more sensitive to heat 

 and more appreciative of the ' shadow of a great rock in a weary land' than most 

 animals. As described in the beautiful translations of a modern Greek ballad, by 

 Niebuhr and Miss Winkworth (Life and Letters, vol. ii. p. 23, ed. 1852), it loves the 

 * still cold fountain ' of the ' many fountained ' mountain-top, rroXviriSaKos aKpojpdijs, 

 whilst, as a visit to the hungry and thirsty, stony and light-soiled, island of Rhenea 

 showed me, the goat will retain its vigour and independence of bearing with but the 

 scantiest supply of succulent vegetation and of pure water. The goat possesses 

 certain advantages over the sheep as a domestic animal in a * barren and dry land 

 where no water is,' but in a palustrine or lacustrine district it possesses none. And 

 I submit therefore that the abundance of it in the Swiss lake-dwellings can be 

 reasonably explained by supposing that it was carried thither by a people or tribe 

 migrating northwards from the Mediterranean countries. Uncultivated races, as is 

 well known and can still be observed, will adhere with a persistence which, if not 

 wholly intelligent, is yet not wholly unpleasing, to their own domesticated animals 

 even when their inferiority to other available breeds is demonstrated ; and the goat, 

 on its side, will, as Buffon has remarked (Hist. Nat. v. 66, ed. 1755), attach itself to 

 man with an irrepressible fixity correlated with its traditional petulance. 



The importance of these points in the natural history of the goat is impressed 

 upon us from the purely anatomical point of view by the absence of any well-marked 

 Western varieties of it; whilst the greater utility of the sheep in our latitudes is 

 shown contrariwise by the multitude of such varieties into which it has effloresced 

 under domestication in a period throughout which the goat has remained as unchanged 

 as the weeds it feeds upon. 



