158 WILD WHITE CATTLE OF GREAT BRITAIN. 



a sudden they made a dash forward all together in a line, 

 and, charging close by him across the plain, they then 

 spread out, and after a little time began feeding." 



To this statement Lord Tankerville subsequently 

 added the following remarks: — "I forgot to mention, 

 in my letter to Mr. Hindmarsh, a curious circumstance 

 with respect to the continuation of the breed of the wild 

 cattle. Several years since, during the early part of the 

 lifetime of my father, the bulls in the herd had been 

 reduced to three. Two of them fought and killed each 

 other, and the third was discovered to be impotent, so 

 that the means of preserving the breed depended on the 

 accident of some of the cows producing a bull calf." 



The date of this circumstance would be about the 

 year 1760, or soon after. It quite disposes of the story 

 often told, and mentioned in a note by Jesse in his 

 " Natural History," that the Chillingham herd was once 

 reduced by an epidemic to one cow in calf, which for- 

 tunately produced a bull, and that thus the herd was 

 renewed by inter-breeding of the closest kind. All this 

 is clearly a traditional exaggeration of Lord Tankerville's 

 better authenticated fact. That the statement of Wil- 

 liam Taylor, the steward, with respect to the comparative 

 smallness of the herd in 1690, was correct, is also con- 

 firmed by this circumstance, which seems to show that 

 seventy years later it was not a large one. It increased 

 until seventy years after that, the date of Mr. Hind- 

 marsh's paper, in 1838 — the authority being old Cole, 

 the keeper — there were " about eighty in the herd, com- 

 prising twenty-five bulls, forty cows, and fifteen steers, 

 of various ages." They seem, however — if their numbers 

 were not then somewhat overrated, as probably they 

 were — after that to have again decreased during the 



