744 APPENDIX. 



of making" and storing hay was as yet uninvented. The contem- 

 plation of a herd of dark-coloured mountain cattle in the north of 

 this country, of small size and yet with ragged, ' ill-filled ' out 

 contours, standing on a wintry day in a landscape filled with birch, 

 oak, alder, heath, and bracken, has often struck me as giving a 

 picture which I might take as being very probably not wholly 

 unlike that which the eyes of the ancient British herdsman were 

 familiar with. But the treatment which the domestic ruminant is 

 all but necessaril}^ and universally subjected to in the very earliest 

 days of its life when owned by a savage, is found in modern days 

 and in very different climates from ours to be sufficient to stunt its 

 growth effectually, even in the absence of the unfavourable conditions 

 alluded to. The milk which naturally should have gone to build 

 up the body of the newly-born animal is, in great part at least, 

 taken for the use of its owner and his human family. The vast 

 difference in size between the domestic buffalo of Hindostan, Bos 

 hiihalus, and the wild variety or Arnee \ is due, I apprehend, to the 

 working of this agency upon the former as against the selective 

 agency of the carnivora upon the latter ; and the like causes must 

 have produced the like efliects in former times. 



I take this opportunity of puHing on record the points in which 

 the collections of various objects from the Swiss lake-dwellings seen 

 by me under the favourable conditions above specified (p. 740, note) 

 differ from those procured from British prehistoric graves. 



The absence of any traces of cerealia in our neolithic barrows 

 puts them at once into sharp contrast with the Swiss lake-dwellings 

 even of the early stone age such as Moosseedorf and Wangen ; and 

 though the frequent occurrence of unthrashed-out ears in the 

 specimens from these habitations show^s, as Dr. H. Christ {I. c.) 

 has observed, that their tenants were in a very primitive state, 

 still the presence and botanical characters of these ' Kultur- 



^ An aiiouymoiis but excellent naturalist in the 'Zoologist' (1858, 1859, vol. xvi. 

 p. 6554) wTites thus as to the great difference in size existing between the ^vild and 

 tame buffalo to the advantage of the former : ' We believe the main reason of it to be 

 that the tame calves are deprived of their due supply of milk. The importance of an 

 ample supply of suitable nourishment in early life, as bearing on the future develop- 

 ment of any animal, cannot be over-estimated.' He also states on the authority of a 

 friend that the Burmese domestic buffalo is ' much larger than in Bengal, with splendid 

 horns, and altogether a vastly superior animal, in fact, resembling the wild buffalo. 

 The Burmese never milk them; having the same strange prejudice to milk which the 

 Chinese have, though otherwise both peoples are nearly omnivorous.' See Specimens 

 1350 and 1351, Oxford University Museum, the one from a wild, the other from a 

 tame buffalo. 



