4 WILD WHITE CATTLE OF GREAT BRITAIN. 



been called in to support this view ; but as Mr. Darwin 

 thinks, inconclusively ; for he conceives these tribes 

 would naturally give to the cattle of their adopted 

 country the same names they had given to those they 

 left behind them. Still the fact remains, that simul- 

 taneously with new races of men new breeds of cattle 

 appeared, and that our domestic races were in some 

 degree affected by them. More extended inquiries on 

 this point may possibly hereafter throw some light upon 

 the migrations of man himself. 



But passing over the comparatively unknown, we 

 come to historic times, dating, as respects Britain at least, 

 from the first landing of Caesar in the year 55 before the 

 Christian era. Long before that, nevertheless, as is now 

 abundantly proved, the gigantic Bos urus and the Bos 

 longifrons also had, in common with various other wild 

 animals, inhabited its forests and its marshes, and 

 perhaps been the food of its then barbarous people. 

 But ages had passed since that remote epoch, and 

 when Caesar came he found here, as in Graul, a Celtic 

 civilisation, to which a Roman historian (and the his- 

 torians of the time were all Soman) was scarcely com- 

 petent to do justice. This Celtic civilisation, from 

 whatever source derived — partly, in all likelihood, from 

 the Phoenicians, but certainly from the East — at whose 

 head were the Druids, and whose metropolis was Britain, 

 was suppressed by the Roman conquests both here and 

 in Gaul, but finally culminated some centuries later in 

 Ireland, which had never been enthralled beneath the 

 Roman yoke. To Celtic civilisation historians even yet 

 have scarcely done full justice ; but even Caesar alludes 

 to it not obscurely. He saw indeed very little of the 

 interior, the inhabitants of which he describes as not 



