BOS PRIMIGENIUS. 87 



like the horses aiid oxeii in America and Australia at the present 

 time, for their remains are frequently found in association with 

 animals undoubtedly wild. 



The most important wild animals living in this country during 

 the prehistoric period were the urus, the subject of this memoir 

 (the gigantic skulls of which occur in the great bogs of England 

 and Scotland), the Irish elk, the moose (Cervus dices), and the 

 reindeer ; the two last are far more abundant in the northern 

 deposits of Britain than in the southern. The prehistoric fauna 

 is distinguished from that of the pleistocene not only by the 

 appearance of these mammalia, which were unknown in that 

 period, but by the absence of many species which were then 

 living. The cave-bear, woolly rhinoceros, and mammoth for 

 instance became extinct ; the musk-sheep, glutton, and lemming 

 took refuge in the regions of the north, Avhile the spotted 

 hyaena, hippopotamus, and felis caffer retired to the warm 

 regions of Africa, where they are still living. The few scattered 

 herds of wild white cattle which still exist in parks in England 

 and Scotland may be said to form a connecting link between the 

 wild animals which have become extinct in this country in historic 

 times, and those which may still be classed among our /era? naturce. 

 The weight of opinion favours the view that they are descended 

 from Bos primigenius, the contemporary of Palaeolithic man. No 

 discoveries have as yet been made leading to the supposition that 

 it had been domesticated in Britain in prehistoric times, while on 

 the other hand Bos longifrons had been generally subjugated and 

 used by man. It is now represented by the diminutive Welch and 

 Scotch cattle, whose absence from England is one of the sad proofs 

 of the ruthless extermination of the British by their Saxon 

 conquerors, from which the few who escaped found refuge in the 

 forests and fells of Wales and Scotland. 



Among the relics from the Romano-British village at Woodcuts, 

 preserved in General Pitt-Rivers' museum near Rushmore is a 

 skull of Bos longifrons, to which urus was as superior in size and 

 strength as was Palaeolithic man to Neolithic. Although found 



