ORIGIN OF DOMESTICATE] ANIMALS 225 
was hunted by Czesar and his followers under the name of 
aurochs, or urus, as it was called by Charlemagne in the ninth 
century. (It was certainly encountered by the first crusaders 
and is known to have lingered in the neighborhood of Worms 
as late as the twelfth century.) 
This was the great European wild ox, and it is from him that 
all our larger breeds of common cattle are universally supposed 
to have descended. Contemporaneous with him one or more 
smaller and more slender races! inhabited the same regions, 
especially toward the west. It is from these latter that the Jersey 
and its nearest relative, the Guernsey, are supposed to have 
descended, an assumption resting, of course, upon structural 
considerations rather than upon direct historic evidence. 
A curious circumstance connects these ancient times with the 
living present. There are now in the hunting parks of several 
of the great estates of England herds of wild white cattle, notably 
those at Chillingham in southern Scotland and Chartley and 
Cadzow in northern England. 
These herds are the direct descendants of the original wild 
cattle confined in these parks along with other game some eight 
or nine hundred years ago and perhaps longer ; indeed, authentic 
mention is made of the Chillingham cattle in 1220, thus over- 
lapping the known last days of the aurochs, with which they are 
supposed to be identical, though much reduced in size by reason 
of close confinement to the northern limits of their natural range. 
All these so-called “park cattle” or ‘‘ wild white cattle” are 
somewhat smaller than the larger breeds of domestic cattle of 
to-day. They are of a uniform dirty white color except the ears, 
muzzles, switch of the tail, and the lower portions of the legs, 
which range from brown to a brownish red. They are generally 
horned and in every way resemble common cattle except as to 
1 These are variously called os longifrons, Bos frontosus, etc., from the 
different specimens that have been found of these early “deerlike” forms of 
the cattle kind. It is significant that none of these cattle are found back of the 
later stone age. 
