138 WILD WHITE CATTLE OF GREAT BRITAIN. 



Sir Robert Sibbald, M.D., in his " Scotia Illustrata," 

 published at Edinburgh in 1684, first threw doubts 

 upon these descriptions of the forest bull, and said they 

 " wanted confirmation :" a somewhat bold assertion from 

 a man who could never have seen these animals in their 

 wild state, since they were then, as such, nearly if not 

 quite extinct, while the writers he contradicted lived 

 contemporaneously with them. And he added : " In 

 many places of the mountainous part of Scotland wild 

 oxen are found, and white too, but not so savage or 

 differing in form from domestic cattle." Now I must 

 observe that we have no reason at all to suppose that 

 the Kyloe or Highland breed of cattle were ever white, 

 except in a few exceptional cases. Indeed, the great 

 obstacle which those have to contend with who hold 

 that these forest bulls were derived from cattle from the 

 neighbouring domestic herds which had strayed and 

 become feral is the difficulty — I might say, the impossi- 

 bility — of showing how a small and uniformly dark race 

 of cattle, in structure clearly allied to the Bos longifrons, 

 could be the parents of a larger breed, invariably of pure 

 white, and descended, mainly at least, as osteological 

 examinations clearly show, from the Bos primigenius. 

 But in this case there is not much doubt, for, fortu- 

 nately, Bishop Leslie, 106 years previously, describes 

 also the semi-wild Highland cattle to which Sibbald 

 alludes, treating them as of quite a different species 

 from the wild forest bull. I give the following trans- 

 lation of the passage * : — 



" There are pastured, on the mountains of Argyle, 



* The learned Professor Fleming, in his " British Animals " (Edin- 

 burgh, 1828, p. 24), refers to this passage, and considers that the cattle 

 here described were probably the parents of the domesticated breeds, 

 still rather wild, yet existing in the same parts. 



