PBEHISTORIC FAUNA. 343 



As regards the ox, Bos taurus, I have little to add to what has been 

 written by others with the much larger stores available to their hands 

 which the Swiss pile-dwellings and other habitations of the living pre- 

 historic man have furnished. Rutimeyer, ' Fauna der Pfahlbauten/ 

 p. 127, and Naumann in his interesting memoir, 'Archiv fur Anthropo- 

 logic/ viii. 1, 1875, p. 30, suggest that the variety of ox known in this 

 country as Bos longifrons, and known abroad more correctly as regards 

 structure, if not more conveniently as regards the appropriation of the 

 name, as Bos brachyceros, is probably the oldest domestic animal with 

 which we are acquainted. The older zoologists held (see Buffon, ' Hist. 

 Nat/ xi. 312, ed. 1755), perhaps rather as an article of faith than as the 

 result of enquiry, that ' on a soumis le brebis et le chevre avant d'avoir 

 dompte le cheval, le boeuf ou le chameau/ The dog and the pig have on 

 the grounds of their present and their pristine distribution in space, of 

 their readiness to attach themselves to man and share his fortunes, and, 

 I incline to think, most of all, of their solidarity with him in supporting 

 the alternation of generations of certain entozoa, perhaps equal claims in 

 this matter with the other five animals specified. For my own part I 

 should incline to favour the claims of the dog, on the general grounds of 

 the hunting stage having been earlier in date than the pastoral and of 

 the facility with which commensalism would be set up between the two 

 species when they happened to enter into partnership in the chase. "What 

 I saw at Cissbury (see 'Jour. Anth. Inst./ July, 1876, vol. vi. Article 

 xix.) impressed me very much with the idea that the pitfall counted 

 for much more in the earliest times than I had previously imagined. 



whilst, as a visit to the hungry and thirsty, stony and light-soiled, island of Bhenea 

 showed me, the goat will retain its vigour and independence of bearing with but the 

 scantiest supply of succulent vegetation and of pure water. The goat possesses 

 certain advantages over the sheep as a domestic animal in a * barren and dry land 

 where no water is/ but in a palustrine or lacustrine district it possesses none. And 

 I submit therefore that the abundance of it in the Swiss lake-dwellings can be 

 reasonably explained by supposing that it was carried thither by a people or tribe 

 migrating northwards from the Mediterranean countries. Uncultivated races, as is 

 well known and can still be observed, will adhere with a persistence which, if not 

 wholly intelligent, is yet not wholly unpleasing, to their own domesticated animals 

 even when their inferiority to other available breeds is demonstrated ; and the goat, 

 on its side, will, as Buffon has remarked ('Hist. Nat.* v. 66, ed. 1755), attach itself to 

 man with an irrepressible fixity correlated with its traditional petulance. 



The importance of these points in the natural history of the goat is impressed 

 upon us from the purely anatomical point of view by the absence of any well-marked 

 Western varieties of it ; whilst the greater utility of the sheep in our latitudes is 

 shown contrariwise by the multitude of such varieties into which it has effloresced 

 under domestication in a period throughout which the goat has remained as unchanged 

 as the weeds it feeds upon. 



