ON REMAINS OF THE URUS FOUND IN YORKSHIRE. 123 



nitudine paulo infra elephantos." In colour white, or yellowish 

 white ; a broad, square, and slightly concave forehead matted with 

 shaggy hair; intense black muzzle ; sweeping dark-tipped horns, 

 curved inward, and measuring one-third longer than the cores ; ears 

 filled with red or black hair ; eyes large ; fierce and untamable. 



From a study of the peat-seam in this particular locality we 

 may learn something of the bull's forest companions and of his 

 special surroundings ; bones of Wild Boar, Red-deer, and Rein- 

 deer; red-oak, beech, silver-birch — the stake-like stumps of the 

 latter so closely set that, if each represents a separate tree, there 

 would scarce be room for a Fox to creep between; hazel, too, in 

 abundance as undergrowth, and many another tree which only a 

 specialist can name. There are hazel-nuts in plenty, both entire 

 and split, as if by Squirrels ; the bole of an oak has a Wood- 

 pecker's hole in it. All these tell the same story ; it is the story 

 of a forest-land in character very much resembling an English 

 wood. Possibly our great white Bull trampled under his hoof 

 blue hyacinth, anemone, and primrose, and watched the gambols 

 of Squirrels and the prowlings of Badger, Wild Cat, Otter,* and 

 Fox. The strong and mighty have succumbed to the force of 

 circumstances ; the shy, the unobtrusive, and the cunning have 

 survived to the present time. 



Within a few hundred yards of the forest-bed are the graves 

 of the bull's contemporaries — the Nimrods of that younger world, 

 whose burial mounds the ever-encroaching sea is slowly excavating 

 and exposing the contents to modern eyes. Here the neolithic 

 savage has lain for ages, doubled knee to chin within a rough cist 

 of stone-hewn logs, dove-tailed at the angles, or in the scooped-out 

 trunk of a tree ; and a great mound of red soil, laboriously heaped 

 above by slaves of the sorrowing tribe, is sown throughout with 

 flints of various design, perfect and imperfect, but all bearing un- 

 mistakable traces of man's own handiwork. I have frequently come 

 across bones split longitudinally near these mounds, and in the 

 kitchen-middens on the coast — relics of feasts, and cleft to extract 

 the marrow : these are both animal and human. Neolithic man 

 was sometimes a cannibal. The end of a Deer's bone found 

 embedded within a few feet of the Bull's skull had been perforated 

 through the fosse, probably by human agency. 



* The perfect skull of an Otter has been recently found in the same locality. 



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