BRITISH PARK-CATTLE 
77 
unhesitatingly regards park-cattle as of indigenous 
origin, and directly descended from the aurochs, 
although he makes no attempt to explain why they 
were white instead of black. 
Much the same view is expressed by Professor 
David Low in his British Domesticated Animals} 
where he considers park-cattle to be specifically 
identical alike with the aurochs and with domesti- 
cated cattle, and directs special attention to their 
similarity to the white strain of the Pembroke breed, 
of which he remarks that " their whole essential 
characters are the same as those at Chillingham and 
Chartley Park, and elsewhere. Their horns are white 
tipped with black, and extended and turned upwards 
in the manner distinctive of the wild (park) breed. 
The inside of the ears and the muzzle are black, and 
their feet are black to the fetlock joint. ... In- 
dividuals of this race are sometimes born entirely 
black, and then they are not to be distinguished from 
the common cattle of the mountains." 
He then goes on to say that the white coat of 
park-cattle is that which the animals would probably 
assume in a forest country with the climate of 
Albion — ^which is a manifest fallacy. 
An entirely new departure was taken in 1849 by 
Sir Richard Owen, who, in his British Fossil 
Mammals and Birds} wrote that instead of being 
descendants of the aurochs, British cattle — and 
especially the park-breeds — were more probably 
" derived from the already domesticated cattle of the 
Roman colonists, of those boves nostril for example, 
by comparison with which Caesar endeavoured to 
^ London, 1842 (p. 240 of the smaller 2nd edition). 
2 P. 500. 
