Wild Cattle of Great Britain. 499 
the island by Roman, Norseman, Dane, and Norman. The student 
who has devoted himself unremittingly to this historical aspect of 
the question is the Rev. G. Gilbert, of Claxton, Norwich. The 
views of this gentleman, who has paid much attention to the history 
of the polls, are worthy of study, and it is here appropriate to refer 
to them. Ido so by quoting extracts from several communications 
I have been favored with from him : “ My own opinion,” he writes 
(and he begins by referring to the Aberdeen poll) “is that there 
was in Scotland, on the east coast, long before the short-horn strug- 
gled into notoriety, even in England, herds of polled cattle which 
owed their best qualities of hardiness and combined power of pro- 
ducing good beef and milk from the same animal to that very breed 
which gave these properties to the short-horn—i.e., to that big 
polled white which seems to me to have come to Great Britain above 
eight hundred years ago with the Baltic Rovers, and to have existed 
in considerable numbers, in places widely apart, down to the 
beginning of last century without there having been any recent 
connection. 
“The polled herds in England, Scotland and Ireland all held, 
before there was much intercourse between cattle-men, one common 
infusion, and that was the blood of the whites from the far north. 
ose white cattle seem to have parted with their color more 
readily than they parted with their thick muscle (i.e., lean flesh), 
tending to milk, hardiness, and polled heads. (Of course recently, 
since 1750, there have been large transmissions of English cattle to 
Scotland, and vice versd, and also of English and Scotch cattle to 
Ireland. I doubt if ever before this century either England or 
Scotland has ever borrowed sires from Treland, though England 
has borrowed for quite a century Scotch sires, and Scotland Eng- 
lish sires for the same period.) Gradually, at the end of the last 
century, distinct types of those county herds which all had some 
ingredients common and, each, some distinct element, got more or 
less fixed, until they reproduced themselves, as they do now, even 
m non-pedigree stock, with tolerable certainty. I fancy the last 
half of last century saw the formation of all British breeds now 
existing in distinct form. The short-horns and all the polls hold 
the largest infusion of the big white, the Midland and Hereford 
hold the most of the old South Europe longhorn, whilst the Devon, 
Kerry, and small N orth Highlander hold the most of the type — 
Known as Bos longifrons, all of which seem to have been the first 
domestic cattle in Great Britain and Ireland. 
