XXIV. 

 EEPOET ON BONES FKOM CHASTLETON 1 . 



I was reluctantly obliged to decline to join the excursion to 

 Chastleton, but I have been favoured with a small box of bones 

 from that pleasant place, of which I will now say a few words. 



All the bones, with two or three exceptions, are bones of domestic 

 animals. The exceptions are constituted by two lower jaws and 

 one upper jaw of the water rat, Arvicola amjohibius. These jaws 

 have a certain interest, as they are just the parts which the polecat, 

 Mustela putorius, leaves behind — and rightly, as the large rootless 

 molars and the strong incisors of this harmless vegetable-feeding 

 rodent would be a hard thing for his sharp scissorlike teeth. I 

 have found large quantities of these jaws, handfuls in fact, and 

 without exaggeration, in the lairs of polecats. The polecat is a 

 river-haunting riparian animal, but will carry even frogs a long 

 distance away from the marshy places he finds them in. 



Sus scrofa, varietas domestica, is represented by a few incisors. 

 The pig, being a beast familiar to man from the very earliest times, 

 as his solidarity with man in supporting the life-phases of more 

 than one Entozoon shows, is rarely absent from the earliest pre- 

 historic finds of Neolithic times. 



The cow, Bos (probably) longifrons, is also represented, but 

 scantily. 



The sheep, Ovis aries, or the goat (there are no differentiating parts 



1 [These bones were obtained during excavations conducted under the direction of 

 E. W. Brabrook, F.S.A., Alfred White, F.S.A., and J. E. Price, F.S.A., in the camp 

 at Chastleton, Moreton-in-Marsh, on the confines of Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire, and 

 Worcestershire. Mr. Price states, in the ' Journal of the Anthropological Institute,' 

 vol. x. p. 125, 1881, that the excavations proved the whole of the camp to be of 

 Roman construction. ' There is nothing in the objects found to illustrate a period 

 either earlier or later than the Roman occupation.' — Editor.] 



