PREHISTORIC FAUNA. 337 



great quantities in a barrow together with a few remains of the polecat, 

 Mustela 2>utorius, which latter animal had used the place as a lair and 

 probably nest for a considerable period. The upper and lower jaws of 

 the water-rats had been left intact, their strong teeth, which should have 

 prevented what I am well assured were similar remains in other barrows 

 from being spoken of as rats' bones, having been found over-resistent 

 by their destroyers, who had however, with the characteristic instinct of 

 their genus, never spared the brain-containing calvariae. 



The dog has only rarely been met with in British interments either 

 of the stone or of the bronze age, a circumstance worthy of note when 

 we recollect how very commonly the dog has in all countries kept his 

 master or mistress company in the tomb as faithfully as during life. 

 One instance however of such an interment I noted and have described 

 ('Journal Anth. Inst./ v. p. 157; Article xviii.) in the neolithic bar- 

 row at Eyford ; the dog had undoubtedly been buried together with a 

 woman, whose skeleton was, like that of the dog, still partly in situ. 

 The characters of the dog's skeleton, like those of many other objects 

 found even in interments most undoubtedly of the stone- and bone-age, 

 are such as, irrespective of any reference to what we know of palaeo- 

 lithic times, to impress upon us the conviction that the men even of 

 those far-off days had yet been preceded by many generations who had 

 made-weapons and domesticated animals. This dog bears no resem- 

 blance to the wolf- like Esquimaux dog on the one side, nor to any such 

 small terrier-like breed on the other, as might suggest that it represents 

 a lately domesticated jackal. It may be conveniently spoken of, as 

 Biitimeyer ('Fauna der Pfahlbauten,' p. 118) does speak of the dog, 

 similarly rare in the relics from the Swiss lake-dwellings, as a l middle- 

 sized ' dog, ' einen Hund von mittlerer Grosse ;' a description which, 

 however vague, is decisive as to its representing a long-domesticated 

 breed. The lower jaw, the only part of the head which had been left 

 undisturbed in situ, had the stoutness and was about the size of that 

 bone as seen in some of the smaller English mastiffs ; its trunk bones are 

 still incomplete, but may be supposed to have made up the framework 

 of a body about the size of that of an ordinary shepherd's-dog K The 



1 The dog was abundantly represented in the Norfolk flint mines known as 'Grimes 

 Graves,' and described by Canon Greenwell, 'Journal Ethnol. Soc.' 1870, p. 431. I 

 do not know the size of the animals to which these remains belonged, but the in* 

 genious argument which Eutimeyer has drawn from the supposedly uniform in- 

 feriority in size of the stone-age dog for the singleness of race of his human masters 

 is invalidated by the discovery in the very early lake-dwelling of Luscherz by Dr. 

 Studer of more than one race of dogs. See 'Bericht liber die Pfahlbauten des 

 Bielersees,' 1875, p. 24. 



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