THE BO VINES 361 



tiguous to London) seem more to have been the descendants 

 of cattle run wild, and these feral oxen may have been of mixed 

 blood — urus and its modified descendant the Keltic short horn, 

 together with breeds of Italian cattle contributed by the Romans 

 (these cattle also being descendants of the urus). These, in 

 fact, were the parent stocks of the English wild cattle of recent 

 historical times, and of to-day. 



The Keltic short horn, to which many names have been 

 given, is, according to some zoologists, a domesticated breed of 

 oxen resulting from degenerate tamed races of aurochs mixed 

 with imported " Indian " domestic cattle from Egypt and Asia. 

 The more probable explanation of the variety, at any rate in the 

 British Islands, seems to be that it is nothing but a degenerate 

 urus, perhaps orginating in a small breed of that monstrous 

 ox in some restricted mountain country which became more 

 easily tamed by savage man, and which may have accompanied 

 the Neolithic peoples in their march towards Britain from France 

 and Germany. It is true that remains of Bos taurus longifrons 

 are found abundantly in Ireland, under conditions and with 

 associations which seem to indicate a perfectly wild condition. 

 Remains of the same dwarfed ox have also been found in 

 England associated with the bones of the mammoth, but these 

 English remains are not sufficient to determine precisely whether 

 they refer to a small form of bison or to a dwarfed type of urus. 

 From what we know of mammoth remains in Ireland it is quite 

 conceivable that that elephant may have lingered on till the 

 arrival of Neolithic man with his half-domesticated breeds of 

 dwarfed urus. 



The British " wild" cattle of to-day are found in the purest 

 form, that is to say, with the greatest likeness to wild animals, 

 in the forest of Cadzow, the ancient seat of the Dukes of 

 Hamilton in Lanarkshire (South-west Scotland). They lingered 

 also down to the 'seventies of the nineteenth century in the 

 parks of Kincardine, Stirling, and Cumbernauld, and at Drum- 

 lanrig, in Dumfriesshire. In most of these Scotch parks, however, 

 they have died out or become mingled with other stock, with 



