296 MOSTLY MAMMALS 
as there was no species to which it could possibly apply 
save the bison, which then still survived in Poland and 
elsewhere, it was transferred to-that animal, of which, as 
already mentioned, it became the common designation. 
A precisely analogous instance has occurred in Eastern 
Russia, The bison, in place of being restricted, as now, 
to Lithuania and the Caucasus, was formerly much more 
widely distributed. When it disappeared from certain 
districts, its name still survived, and became transferred 
by the peasants to the eastern race of the red-deer, 
as the only large wild ungulate with which they were 
acquainted. 
As regards the gradual extermination of the aurochs 
as a wild animal during the Middle Ages, much important 
evidence has been collected of late years by Messrs. Nehring 
and Schiemenz. 
During the Pleistocene epoch, when the mammoth and 
the woolly rhinoceros inhabited the British Islands and 
the Continent (which were then one), the aurochs was a 
common animal, as is attested by the abundance of its 
remains in formations of that age. Some of the finest 
and largest skulls of this so-called Bos primigenius were 
obtained by the late Sir Antonio Brady from the brick-earths 
of Ilford, in Essex, Other skulls have been obtained from 
the peat of Perthshire, from Burwell Fen, Cambridgeshire, 
and from a peaty deposit at Newbury, in Berkshire. A 
skull from Burwell Fen, in the Woodwardian Museum at 
Cambridge, has a flint implement embedded in the fore- 
head, thus showing that the animal was hunted by the 
prehistoric inhabitants of our islands at a time when the 
mammoth and rhinoceros had already disappeared. 
As to the date of the extermination of the wild aurochs 
in Britain there is no decisive evidence, but no skulls or 
