352 THE DESTRUCTION OF THE FOREST 



And familiarity with its presence in the midlands is clearly 

 indicated in an ancient Gaelic poem, the Lament for 

 MacGregor of Knaro attributed to the first half of the 

 seventeenth century, and referring to the region of the 

 MacGregors in northern Perthshire : 



Tho' nimble the squirrel is, 

 By patience may it be ta'en 

 and again 



So joyful grew my heart 



That like the squirrel could I leap. 



When the Squirrel disappeared from the Lowlands, there 

 is no record 1 . It had certainly gone long before it was 

 mentioned as extinct, in 1841, in the New Statistical Account 

 of Berwickshire and Roxburghshire. In Dumbartonshire, 

 it seems to have been absent from the fauna in 1791. 



In Argyllshire it was known between 1725 and 1745 

 when Alastair MacDonald, the Gaelic poet, likens its activity, 

 as if he had seen it, to the nimbleness of the picked sailors 

 of Clanranald, 



Who can climb the tight hard shrouds 



Of slender hemp, 

 Nimbly as the May-time squirrel 



Up a tree trunk. 



Yet here half a century later, when between 1764 and 1774 

 Professor Walker wrote his Mammalia Scotica, the Squirrel, 

 once plentiful, had now become very rare : " In sylvis Lornae 

 superioris, antehoc copiose, nunc rarior." In 1790, accord- 

 ing to the Old Statistical Account, it was "now very rare, 

 if not extinct'' in Lismore and Appin, and it probabry 

 disappeared entirely about the opening of the nineteenth 

 century. The New Statistical Account of 1842 records it 

 as formerly abundant, "but now extinct." 



About the same time it disappeared from the more 

 northern woods. It is last mentioned in Moray in 1775, 

 when the Rev. Lachlan Shaw, in his history of the Province, 

 says that "there are still in this province foxes, badgers, 

 and squirrels, weasels, etc." Two years later (1777), Pennant 



1 Dr Harvie-Brown contributed a long and detailed paper on the 

 History of the Squirrel in Great Britain to vols. v. and vi. (1879 and 1881) 

 of the Proceedings of the Royal Physical Society of Edinburgh, to which I 

 owe most of the following record?. 



