35° BRITISH MAMMALS 



A wild sheep once existed in England {Ovis savini), which is 

 thought by Lydekker to have resembled the Armenian mouflon. 

 No traces of this sheep, however, are found in this country of a 

 later date than the early part of the Pleistocene Epoch, almost 

 before Glacial conditions supervened. The only remains we have 

 yet found come from East Anglia. It is very doubtful if it 

 was contemporaneous with man in England, and almost certain 

 that the domestic sheep of England in their most primitive types 

 could not be descended from this form by its gradual taming. 

 No traces of domestic animals existing in these islands (except 

 the dog, perhaps) are obtainable till the Neolithic period, which 

 would be after the close of the Glacial conditions. But Ovis 

 savini may have existed, almost certainly did, on the Continent 

 of Europe, and may have been one of the sources from which 

 Ovis aries, the domestic sheep, was formed. At present it is 

 an open question whether any wild sheep continued to exist in 

 the British Islands through and after the Glacial ages. The 

 Highland sheep and some of the Welsh breeds, and the sheep 

 to be seen on the islands off the west coast of Ireland, are 

 extremely like wild animals. Those from Western Ireland and 

 from St. Kilda off the west coast of Scotland have a tendency 

 to lose their wool and revert to a hairy type. On the other 

 hand. Highland sheep in the formation of their horns are very 

 like the merino breed from Central Spain. The Soa and St. Kilda 

 sheep are known to have been introduced by the vikings from 

 Norway and the Faroes. 



The difficulty in the pedigree of the domestic sheep is its 

 long tail, as already mentioned. It almost seems necessary to 

 assume the existence of an extinct species (this might have been 

 Ovis savini), which, like the North African Ovis tervia, retained 

 the primitive long tail lost in all other living wild sheep. If 

 physiologists could assure us that it was possible for an animal 

 to replace the lost vertebrae of its tail by the fresh development 

 of nodules of bone, and if we could assume that the domestic 

 sheep had done this, it would be easy enough to decide that our 

 sheep had arisen from a mingling of wild stock such as the 



