EXTINCT -BRITISH QUADRUPEDS. 279 
(1100—1137), we find the tymbra beveriorum fixed at four- 
pence. 
When the Beaver became finally extinct in the British 
Islands is uncertain, and perhaps impossible to discover; but 
Boethius, writing in 1526, enumerates jibri or Beavers amongst 
the fere nature of Loch Ness, whose fur was in request for ex- 
portation towards the end of the fifteenth century. 
From that time until the present there is a blank in the 
history of British Beavers, and although it is not at all probable 
that we shall ever see Beavers again in a wild state in this 
country, it is interesting to note the success which has attended 
the experiment made by the Marquis of Bute, who within the last 
few years has turned out some imported Beavers in the Isle of 
Bute, where they have not only thriven and ‘done well, but have 
increased and multiplied. 
In connection with the subject of their increase in this 
country, it may be noted that in the gardens of this Society the 
Beavers have bred several times, and between the years 1871 and 
1874 several young ones were reared. 
Another animal to be seen in the Gardens of this Society— 
the Reindeer—is of special interest as having been once a 
native of the British Islands. There is abundant proof of its 
former existence here in the quantity of horns, skulls, or other 
portions of the skeleton which have been brought to light at 
various times in different parts of the country. 
This animal must have been one of the earliest arrivals on 
British soil after the ice and snow of the glacial epoch began to 
disappear, and it is in caverns and river gravels and sands of past 
glacial ages that we first meet with its remains. Its abundance 
in British deposits of this date is very remarkable. Professor 
Boyd Dawkins has found portions of its bones and horns in 
no less than thirteen out of twenty-one caverns examined by him, 
while the Red-deer was found only in seven; thus, contrary to 
what is generally assumed to be the case, the Reindeer predomi- 
nated in numbers over the Red-deer at the time the British bone 
caves were being filled. 
In the post-glacial river deposits the same preponderance of 
the Reindeer is observed. It has been found in the gravels of 
Brentford, in a railway cutting at Kew Bridge, and higher up the 
Thames in a gravel bed at Windsor, where, in the spring of 1867, 
