412 ANIMAL REMAINS FOUND AT CISSBURY. 



1 Comm. de Bello Gallico/ vi. 28, when writing of the capture and 

 slaughter of Bos primigenius by the Germans : ' Hos studiose foveis 

 captos interficiunt. Hoc se labore durant adolescentes,' &c. These 

 five latter words appear to me to mean that a good deal of trouble 

 must have been taken and a good deal of risk run in getting the 

 wild cattle to the pitfalls ; merely butchering the animals after 

 they had tumbled in would not harden a young man, at least in the 

 sense in which Julius, one of the least cruel of a cruel people in a 

 cruel age, would have wished to see a young man hardened. 

 Hurdles of gorse probably were arranged on the principle of the 

 wicker-hoops in a decoy, and it is easy to see how, by such a plan, 

 eked out, perhaps, by the firing of heaps of the same useful mate- 

 rial, a wild bull or a herd might be driven over a pitfall. 



II. Remains from l Large Pit. 9 



I come, in the second place, to the consideration of the animal 

 remains found in the 'large pit' marked m in fig. 1, Plate xiv., 

 given in sections and plan in Plate xvii. of Colonel Lane Fox's 

 paper in the number of the f Journal of the Anthropological Institute' 

 for January, 1876, vol. v. No. 3, and described by him pp. 379— 

 382, 1. c. The entire number of bones from the large pit which 

 I have before me for identification amounts, exclusively of a number 

 of deer-horn implements described by Colonel Lane Fox, and ex- 

 clusively of five molars of horse found lying superficially, to about 

 thirty. Of this number, ten are fragments of bones of the domestic 

 ox, Bos longifrons. Ten upper jaw molars from the same animal 

 are likewise counted in it, and enable us to say that at least two 



Edward Lee. Longmans, 1876): 'They (the natives) catch them in pitfalls made 

 with great care, and then kill them.' That great care was used in making and 

 covering over the pitfalls I do not dispute, but great care, I am sure, must also have 

 been used to secure that the animals ran over them. Julius says neither more nor 

 less than that the uri are taken, with great trouble, by means of pitfalls and killed ; 

 and that the great trouble includes the riskful process of driving the herd, as well as 

 the very safe one of digging the pit, the context seems to me to indicate. Hence I 

 demur also to the free rendering given by Dr. J. A. Smith in the 'Proceedings of the 

 Society of Antiquaries of Scotland,' ix. p. 596: 'The man who killed the greatest 

 number of them, even by the pitfall, brings the horns as an evidence of his prowess, 

 and is highly applauded by his countrymen,' — though this interpretation, like Mr. 

 Lee's, shows that the author had striven to realise to himself the circumstances hinted 

 at rather than described by Julius, and did give the greatest man of all antiquity, if 

 not of all time, credit for writing something like common sense. 



