186 OTHEE ANIMALS 



EACIAL MEMOBY IN CATTLE 



In an article under the above heading in your issue 

 of December 3, 1904, the following sentence occurs : 

 " In the forests they were exposed to the attacks of 

 wolves which killed off their calves, and left that in- 

 eradicable habit of concealing the young noted in the 

 cows at Chillingham." Was not this habit originally 

 common to all cattle? Here, in the South African Karoo, 

 where the cows generally calve in the veldt , they invariably 

 hide their calves so that the herds have to watch them 

 sometimes for days, and follow them surreptitiously, to 

 find out where the calves are hidden. The cause of this 

 is, no doubt, the same it is a measure of precaution 

 against beasts of prey. It is, I suppose, not more than 

 forty or fifty years since wolves were exterminated in 

 this part of the country. 



ANNA HOWABTH. 



January 28, 1905. 



NOTE. Man himself is a kind of museum of vestigial 

 remains ; he emerges, in Whitman's queer phrase, " stuc- 

 coed all over with quadrupeds." He is, in fact, more 

 primitive in structure than the over-specialized gorilla 

 and the other anthropoids, and the appendix is to archaic 

 structure what the cattle hiding their calves, the horse 

 shying, the dog turning round on the hearth, etc., etc., 

 are to archaic instinct. Very strange and interesting are 

 these useless persistencies of the past into the present, 

 these faded manuscripts of an original creative idea, but 

 to interpret them despairingly is a folly. These relics, 

 both of function and of structure, are surely a living 

 witness to the dynamic power and changefulness of the 

 evolutionary process. We may have an abbreviated tail- 

 stump hidden away in us, but it serves to remind us how 

 far we have travelled from the time of tails. A bird's 



