334 APPENDIX. 



the one hand as regards literature, that poetical writers would have 

 omitted to use for illustration the habits and bearing 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 every- 

 where, even by the non-progressive Indians of the Amazons (see Bates, 

 1. c, 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 hand, does the discovery of the bones of Gallus as 

 described by Alphonse Milne Edwards ('Reliquiae Aquitanicae, p. 241) 

 in association with ' those of Ursus spelaeus, 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 repre- 

 sented 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 intro- 

 duce 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 (1. c, pp. 

 243-247) appears to think otherwise, I should incline to think that the 

 Crane, Grus cinereus, may have occupied this country continuously from 

 palaeolithic down to the comparatively recent period of its extinction 

 here. Difference merely of size is not sufficient in this case to establish a 

 specific difference. The bones of more than one specimen of this bird 

 were found by two of my former pupils, Mr. W. Bruce Clarke and Mr. 

 Randal Johnson of Pembroke College, in a rubbish-pit at Wytham, near 

 Oxford, mixed up with the skeletons of three dogs, with bones of ox, 

 pig, roe, horse, teal and wild-swan, and with coarse culinary nail-marked 

 and other British pottery, by which the date of this ' find ' is fixed to 

 the bronze age. I have not met with any remains of this bird in any 



