PREHISTORIC FAUNA. 345 



surface, and, finally, by the huge size of the wild animals' bones when 

 viewed in contrast with those of the tame races, we are helped as 

 effectually as by almost any other means to realise the immense differ- 

 ence which exists between those times and ours ; in which last the repre- 

 sentatives of the wild ox, still surviving under Lord Tankerville's care 

 at Chillingham in an at least half-wild state, are so much smaller, and the 

 domestic races so much larger. The wild animal of prehistoric times to 

 attain and sustain its vast bulk must have had command of good pas- 

 turage which even the cherished and protected herds of modern wild 

 cattle might envy; but with this, itself a thing possible only in a 

 district occupied but sparsely by man, there co-operated another agency 

 distinctive of a wild country. This was the selecting agency of car- 

 nivora, in the Britain of those times chiefly wolves, which would weed 

 out the weaker members of each herd, long before they attained the 

 sexual maturity which might have enabled them to bring into being a 

 stock of weakness and smallness like their own. The rifle-bullet, on the 

 other hand, of modern days selects the monarch of the herd, and leaves 

 the sustentation of the race to the despised smaller representatives of it. 

 The differences between the conditions affecting the domestic breeds of 

 ancient and modern times respectively are at least as striking. The 

 range available to a savage tribe ever at war with its neighbours, as is 

 the habit of modern, as it was of ancient uncivilised tribes, must have 

 been limited and small relatively to the number of the cattle which a 

 tribe devoid of cerealia must have had for their sustentation. This 

 would affect the animal during the whole period of its growth, and very 

 materially. And we have to add to this the consideration that not only 

 were such articles as turnips wholly unknown to the ancient Briton, but 

 that even such an art as that of making and storing hay was as yet un- 

 invented. The contemplation of a herd of dark-coloured mountain 

 cattle in the north of this country, of small size and yet with ragged, 

 1 ill-filled ' out contours, standing on a wintry day in a landscape filled 

 with birch, oak, alder, heath, and bracken, has often struck me as giving 

 a picture which I might take as being very probably not wholly unlike 

 that which the eyes of the ancient British herdsmen were familiar with. 

 But the treatment which the domestic ruminant is all but necessarily and 

 universally subjected to in the very earliest days of its life when owned by 

 a savage, is found in modern days and in very different climates from ours 

 to be sufficient to stunt its growth effectually, even in the absence of the 

 unfavourable conditions alluded to. The milk which naturally should 

 have gone to build up the body of the newly-born animal is, in great 

 part at least, taken for the use of its owner and his human family. The 



