CATTLE IN SCOTLAND 59 



under the microscope showed " the same appearance and 

 structure as the dark hairs of a Shetland cow taken from 

 one of the rivlins or Shetland shoes of untanned hide in the 

 Museum [of Antiquities in Edinburgh]." 



Although nothing is known from written records re- 

 garding the nature of the early domestication of cattle in 

 Scotland, the bone remains seem to point to the wild 

 or half-wild nature of the herds. In the first place, the 

 limb bones are those of an active mobile creature, and this 

 activity could only mean that the cattle were not restricted 

 in any serious degree, but ranged over large areas and 

 depended on their movements for escape from the Brown 

 Bears and Wolves which shared the forest with them. In 

 the second place, in the Scottish bone deposits which I have 

 examined, and which range from Neolithic times to a 

 period when Christianity was already firmly established on 

 the east coast, the large majority of the remains of the 

 Celtic Shorthorn are those of young animals, as the presence 

 of milk-teeth and of bones not completely ossified clearly 

 shows. This I take to mean that the inhabitants found it 

 easier to slay the young than the old animals that indeed 

 adult animals were hard to slay, for other things being 

 equal, their greater food value should have made them 

 preferred, and their bones to preponderate in the refuse- 

 heaps. The indications are that the cattle were captured 

 by a sort of hunting which found the young animals ready 

 victims, and therefore that the herds of the Celtic Short- 

 horn were little better than wild. 



It may indeed be said that part of the influence of man 

 upon domestic cattle has been expended in gradually 

 narrowing their range of freedom, and with this, their 

 activity, so that from the lean muscular oxen of the wilds, 

 the fat ox of the stall has been developed. The pro- 

 cess of enclosing has been a gradual one, as old Scots 

 Laws demonstrate, 'for the "Leges Forestarum " generally 

 ascribed to William the Lion (A.D. 1165-1214) invoke 

 penalties upon cattle found straying in the King's forest a 

 superfluous provision had the cattle been enclosed or even 

 carefully herded. That they were not so herded even in 

 the seventeenth century is shown by the fact that it was 

 found necessary in 1686 to pass a law that cattle should be 



