332 THE ZOOLOGIST. 
zood many which I have shot and opened; but beechmast and 
acorns are the favourite diet. In April they attack the young 
wheat before it has begun to sprout. Their voracity is only 
equalled by the capacity of their crops. A Wood Pigeon’s crop 
will contain from twenty to thirty acorns, or 100 beechmast 
or 500 ivy-berries, and then not be full. When satisfied they 
retire to some thick silver-firs to sleep, but the slightest rustling 
of a footstep, or the snapping of a branch, is enough to frighten 
them. They find both acorns and beechmast palatable enough 
long after they have begun to germinate, and I consider them 
much better for the table on such diet than when feeding on 
turnip-tops. With frost and snow they always leave Cromer. 
This bird is generally accredited with yellow eyes, but I have seen 
them both slate-coloured and white, the latter in the young bird. 
The birdstuffer at Holt has a Wood Pigeon with a crest three- 
quarters of an inch high. It was shot by the son of a game- 
keeper near here, and has this abnormal growth on the back of 
its head. It may possibly be the result of an old shot-wound. 
OCCASIONAL NOTES. 
ON THE FORMER EXISTENCE OF THE BEAR AND WOLF IN CoRNWALL.— 
I venture to add to your very interesting abstract of one of the “ Davis 
Lectures,” published in the last number of ‘The Zoologist,’ a few suggestions 
as to the past Natural History of Cornwall. So far as I know, nothing has 
been discovered which makes certain the existence at any time of any sort 
of Bear (Badger of course excepted) in Cornwall; but in the Cornish 
language the word “ Ors” is rendered “ Bear,” and in one of the oldest, 
if not the very oldest, existing records of the old Cornish tongue occurs 
the entry ‘“‘ Ursus = Ors = Bear” (see Norris’s Vocabulary, and Borlase’s 
‘Antiquities of Cornwall’). As a general rule, it is held that if the 
old Cornish language produces a word evidently based upon a Latin 
derivative (pons =a bridge, for instance) it represents something intro- 
duced, or at least renamed, by the Romano-Britons; and these are 
people who, however hazy the account of them may be, are within 
the limits of historical time, and consequently the fact that the Roman 
“ Ursus” appears in Old Cornish as ‘ Ors,” meaning a Bear (Borlase says 
it means a he-bear), points to the conclusion that the Bear was existent in 
Cornwall long after the commencement of the Christian era. Our moor- 
lands must have been then so vast in proportion to the size of our county 
