22 SCIENTIFIC SURVEY OF ABERDEEN AND DISTRICT 
which first peopled the uncovered face of the land has left few remains 
in the North-east, it may be assumed that the creatures whose bones we 
found recently in ‘the north of Scotland—the reindeer, a great bear, lynx, 
arctic fox, lemming, mountain hare, ptarmigan, and others—were typical 
members of the first post-glacial fauna of the district. 
That arctic association of animals has gone with the climate which 
brought it, but it has left an interesting relict fauna now confined, in 
our area, to the Grampian mountains: the Scottish mountain hare 
(Lepus timidus scoticus), the Scottish ptarmigan (Lagopus mutus millaist), 
each of which assumes a white coat in winter, and the snow-bunting 
(Plectrophenax nivalis), the first family party of which in Britain was 
seen in the Cairngorms by MacGillivray in 1830, and which breeds only 
on the high mountains. Perhaps the stoat (Mustela erminea) is also a 
relict of the same fauna, for its winter change to white, which suggests 
an arctic habit, takes place regularly and completely only in the northern 
and higher part of its range in Britain. 
The change of climate acted directly upon the inhabitants, repressing 
some, encouraging others, but its most evident effects have taken place 
indirectly, through the modifications it induced in vegetation, and in 
particular upon woodland. 
REDUCTION OF Forest LAND AND ITs ErFEcTs.—Peat-bogs throughout 
the district reveal the presence at one time of a great pine forest which 
covered the low-lying country and is represented in the Grampians up 
to a height of 2,400 ft. above sea-level, far above the present-day pine 
limit. A moist period followed its greatest development, when the 
recent beds of peat were formed and swamped much of what had been 
forest land. A good example was the peat-forest in the parish of Logie 
Coldstone, where dense masses of trees were found at a depth of to ft. 
in peat over an area of 100 acres, and where the trees seemed to have been 
blown over, for the trunks lay all in one direction, the effect of a gale 
playing upon woodland already sapped of its strength because of the 
marsh developing about its roots. 
In later times man contributed to the disappearance of the woodland,' 
but even in the fourteenth century Aberdeenshire had at least eight 
great ‘ forests,’ one of which was granted by King Robert the Bruce in 
1324 to the Earl Marischal, a forerunner of the founder of Marischal 
College. Together nature and man have reduced the woods of the area 
to less than a tithe of their former extent, and so another great change 
has been imposed upon the character of the fauna. The red deer 
(Cervus elaphus), a woodland animal which in former days left its bones 
in peat-bogs throughout the low ground of the district, has been driven 
to the bleak and barren hills, and the relative poverty of food in its new 
habitat has been reflected in smaller size of body and less luxuriant 
antlers. Many denizens of the woods have become scarce or have been 
banished : the disappearance of the wolf has already been referred to ; 
the wild cat (Felis silvestris), so common a century and a half ago that 
44 were killed between 1776 and 1785 about Braemar, has gone, the last 
1 An account of the factors which made for the destruction of Scottish forests 
will be found in the writer’s Influence of Man upon Animal Life in Scotland. 
