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permitted of it, he would treat of these matters in elaborate detail ; but 

 now he merely wished to announce a few facts which, he believed, 

 would be of considerable interest to naturalists, whether in Ireland or 

 elsewhere. 



In the first place, he would call attention to the Bos frontosus of Mis- 

 son, which, so far as he had yet seen, was the hitherto supposed Bos 

 primigenius of Ireland. He exhibited specimens, together with a fine 

 series of heads or skulls of the Bos longifrons, many of both species pre- 

 senting the very conspicuously evident efiect and result of the fatal blow 

 which had been undeniably administered by man. He would not now 

 enter deeply into the question of the degree of antiquity of these skulls ; 

 but he had recently been exploring at Uriconium, the city of the Wrekin 

 (Wroxeter orUroxeter), so long the home and head-quarters of the Eoman 

 Twentieth Legion, and there he had seen abundance of the remains of the 

 Bos longifrons, specimens of which he had collected and brought with 

 him to Dublin, which were altogether undistinguishable from the animal 

 of which the more or less ancient remains are so common in Ireland. 

 Those specimens he had presented to the University Museum of this 

 city, together with some examples of Eoman pottery from the same site, 

 inclusive of the famous Samian ware. Fragmentary remains of Bos 

 frontosus are also among the Uriconian specimens in the Shrewsbury 

 Museum. Dr. Blyth even knew of and recognised the identity of 

 Bos longifrons before it had been described by his friend Professor 

 Owen ; and he had long felt sure that there must have been a race or 

 species intermediate to the large Bos primigenius and the compara- 

 tively tiny and diminutive Bos longifrons, which race or species had 

 been described by Professor ITilsson, of Stockholm, as Bos frontosus. 

 The speaker would rather designate it as Bos taurus. There were those 

 three races of yore in pre-historic Europe, which, by interbreeding and 

 commixture in every shape and way, have resulted in and produced the 

 multitudinous breeds of the present day. There was another in the 

 east of Europe, theses trochocerus ; and another in the l^ferbudda depo- 

 sits of the peninsula of India, the Bos namadicus of his friends. Sir 

 T. Proby Cautley and Dr. Falconer, which latter approximated very 

 closely indeed to the European Bos primigenius. He had also seen, 

 some quarter of a century ago, the frontal bones and horn-cores of a Bos 

 noticed in an early volume of the Proceedings of the London Geolo- 

 gical Society," which had been gathered from the high banks of some 

 stream that flows into the Orange or Gareip river in South Africa. 

 Those horns were of the same particular division of the taurine type 

 which was exemplified by B. primigenius, B. frontosus, B. longifrons, 

 B. trochocerus, and by the Indian B. namadicus. 



Dr. Blyth had a deal to say upon this subject, much more than he 

 would now venture to indulge in, to weary, perchance, and to try the pa- 

 tience of the Academy. But he did not believe that all of the remains to 

 which he had adverted were of equal or corresponding antiquity ; but 

 rather that those of Bos frontosus and Bos longifrons reached down to 

 quite a modern period, as compared to the latest remains in Western 



