xxxiv PLEISTOCENE MAMMALIA. 



animal, like the lion, is no longer to be found in Europe, yet we have geological evidence 

 that it spread over France, Germany, and Britain during the Pleistocene age. Moreover, 

 it still lives in Asia Minor, from which the lion has now disappeared. The land fauna of 

 Southern Europe and of Asia Minor is essentially the same, and at the present time, as in 

 the days of Xenophon, the bear and the lynx, the wild boar and the red deer, are common 

 to both regions. 



There is every reason for the belief that when history began in Greece the greater 

 part of the region to the north was overshadowed by forests, and that the wilds of Thrace 

 extended, almost without a break of continuity, to join the Hercynian forest, the great 

 stretches of woodlands in Rumelia, Bulgaria, Wallachia, and Hungary, the forests of the 

 Hartz, and the Black Forest being now mere fragments, isolated by culture, of what was 

 then one whole and connected wilderness. 1 The analogy of our own country, even as late 

 as the time of James II, proves that this must have been the case. For if at that 

 time, in so small and comparatively densely populated an island as Britain, only 

 about one half of the area 2 was under cultivation, it is obvious that the cultivated land 

 must then have borne an infinitely smaller proportion to the uncultivated on the Continent, 

 where the popidation was small, and which was, according to Tacitus, 3 inhabited by 

 wandering tribes, without possessing private property in land, and living partly by 

 hunting and partly by their flocks and herds, and partly by a rude agriculture, and 

 continually at war with each other. The knowledge which we may gather from the 

 points where the civilisation of Greece and Rome touched the borders of this vast forest, 

 and of the animals which lived in it, is therefore of great interest. The bison and the 

 urus ranged throughout this vast area from North Germany as far south as the frontiers 

 of Greece, while in the south the lion and the panther have had their memory preserved 

 in the pages of Xenophon. It is, indeed, a point of considerable interest to note that, 

 although the southern limit of the range of the lion in Thrace is defined with considerable 

 accuracy by both Herodotus and Aristotle, its northern extent is not defined at all ; it 

 may have extended far over the Balkan range into the valley of the Danube within 

 the historic period of Greece. 



The Domestic Animals on the Continent. 



The domestic animals in use throughout the Continent of Europe do not differ in the 

 main from those which lived in Britain in the historic period. The cattle of Norway, 

 France, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain belong to two distinct stocks, of which 



1 Tacitus, ' De Moribus Germanorum,' cap. 4, " Terra etsi aliquanto specie differt, in universum tamen 

 aut silvis horrida aut paludibus fceda." 



* See ' History of England,' by Lord Macaulay, vol. i, cap. 3. 

 3 Tacitus, 'De Moribus Germanorum.' 



