THEIR PROBABLE SOURCE. 7 



Cattle of Great Britain/ the late Rev. John Storer devoted 

 himself mainly to the substantiating of his belief that the 

 semi-wild cattle confined in the Chillingham and Cadzow 

 and some other parks were the progeny of the great urus ; 

 and that the Bos longifrons, having been " driven with its 

 master, the Celt, to the remote and inaccessible parts 

 which the English could not reach," has been preserved in 

 the Kyloe of the Highlands of Scotland and in the smaller 

 cattle of Wales. 



Owen considers it highly improbable that the enormous 

 and savage urus, spoken of by Csesar, was ever tamed so 

 as to be fitted for the uses of man. He believes that the 

 progress of agricultural settlement had caused its " utter 

 extirpation," just as similar progress in North America is 

 fast driving out the bison, and as it drove out the Aurochs 

 in Europe, and that our knowledge of the urus " is now 

 limited to deductions from its fossil or semi-fossil remains." 

 Owen suggests that the early domestic cattle in Britain, 

 more particularly in Eoman Britain, had been derived 

 mainly from importations of breeds " already domesticat- 

 ed " by the founders of the new British colonies. But, he 

 remarks, " if it should still be contended that the natives 

 of Britain or any part of them obtained their cattle by 

 taming a primitive wild race, neither the bison nor the 

 great urus are so likely to have furnished the source of 

 their herds as the smaller primitive wild species or original 

 variety of Bos" the longifrons. Winding up his concise 

 and complete description of the longifrons, the same writer 

 says : " In this field of conjecture the most probable one 

 will be admitted to be that which points to the Bos 

 longifrons as the species which would be domesticated by 

 the aborigines of Britain before the Eoman invasion." Dr 

 John Alexander Smith, of Edinburgh, who has given much 

 attention to the subject, and whose papers on the "Ancient 

 Cattle of Scotland," published in the ' Proceedings of the 

 Society of Antiquaries of Scotland/ are full of interest, 



