PREHISTORIC TIMES IN BRITAIN. 543 



by the tiger [Felis tigris), as well as other Carnivora unfriendly to 

 Suidae, appears to me to have specialised it, especially as regards 

 its dental armature and the bones which carry it, into divergence 

 from the probable line of parentage of the inconveniently so-called 

 Stis indicus. Sus andamanensis, on the other hand, and, I am 

 inclined to think, one or two other of the Asiatic Suidae, show, 

 from a precisely opposite cause, that of restriction to a very con- 

 fined area, the same divergence from what I have imagined the 

 present stock of the Chinese breed may have been. But against 

 any such speculations about what we do not see in the darkness of 

 past ages we have to set what we can see by travel in the broad 

 daylight of the present, viz. that almost all Suidae are readily 

 domesticable by savages in almost every quarter of the globe ; and 

 what savages do now they may very well have done formerly. 



I have not been able to institute any satisfactory examination 

 into the relations of the Aethiopic to the Asiatic Suidae ; and I 

 should welcome an opportunity of examining skulls and skins of 

 the true Sus seen by Dr. Murie and Dr. Barth in Central Africa. 

 It would be additionally satisfactory if investigations could be set 

 on foot as to the existence or non-existence in this Sus of the Cystic 

 form of Taenia solium, which certainly exists in Sus cristatus. 

 Dr. Cobbold informs me that Taenia mediocannellata is the common 

 tapeworm of Indian as of other patients ; but I apprehend that, as 

 it has been so very definitely laid down by others ^ that the pig is 

 at least one source whence inhabitants and sojourners in India 

 become infested with tapeworm, it would be premature to conclude 

 the reverse even from his authoritative statements. It must be 

 very difficult to prove a negative here. 



The facts of most direct importance, however, in investigations 

 as to the relationships of prehistoric to modern races are those of 

 the great variations observed — first, in the entire size of the indi- 

 vidual animals, and, secondly, in the proportions of jiarticular bones, 

 and notably of the laerymal bones, in specimens from the same 

 species or sub-species of Suidae. In view on the one side of this 

 twofold variability which is explicable upon acknowledged physio- 

 logical principles, and aflPects the wild races both of Europe and 



^ Notably by Dr. Charles A. Gordon, 'Medical Times and Gazette,' May 2, 1857, 

 p. 429 ; and by Dr. T. R. Lewis, Appendix B. to ' Eighth Annual Report of the 

 Sanitary Commissioner with the Government of India,' 1871. 



I 



