A. Barrington and K. Pearson 
439 
The purest British cattle would thus be found in Wales, Scotland (and West 
Ireland), where black is the prevailing colour. 
The Romano-British were up the west and middle of England, where they still 
survived to about a century ago. They were the old longhorn breeds. 
The wild white cattle of Chillingham, Chartley, and elsewhere, are Roman 
cattle run wild owing to the unrest of the Anglo-Saxon, and later and more 
especially the Danish invasions. Traces of the Roman cross are still to be seen 
amonof Scottish, Welsh, and Irish cattle. The wild white cattle have black 
muzzles and black or brown points ; that is their hair is brown, or dark at 
the ears, round the eyes and muzzle and often at and below the knees. 
The Anglo-Saxon red cattle, which were once spread over the south of 
England, are still to be found in the red cattle of Norfolk, Sussex, Devon, and 
Hereford. 
The Romano-British or longhorns were some black, some white, but mainly 
flecked, and were largely driven out by the flecked Dutch, although some mixture 
probably took place. 
It will be seen that Professor Wilson's account differs to some extent from 
both those of Boyd Dawkins and McKenny Hughes. 
Upon the ingredients just referred to the breeders had to work when pedigree 
cattle-breeding, which is scarcely more than a century old, came into vogue. 
The shorthorn has possibly arisen from four races, the Celtic, a Romano-British, 
an Anglo-Saxon, and the "Dutch*", and even some of these are mixtures. 
Confining our attention to coat-colour, the black Celtic, if it contributed any- 
thing, must have been bred out early. But it is doubtful whether there was 
not a red Celtic, and a red Galloway heifer (1760-1770) appears to have been 
connected with the beginnings of the breed. Thus the shorthorn red may have 
had three sources, an Anglo-Saxon red, the red of the Dutch flecking, and the 
supposed Celtic red. The white may liave come through the Romano-British, 
through an Anglo-Saxon white or possibly through the white in the Dutch. The 
particolours and the roans are of equally doubtful origin, although it probably 
is safe to assert that they are due to the breeds of latest importation ; and it thus 
seems fairly impossible to determine d j)riori how many distinct red, roan, parti- 
colour, or white types may really exist in the case of the shorthorn. The 
importance of this statement for any Mendelian interpretation must be obvious. 
We may have reds which are dominant, recessive or even heterozygous to white or 
even to other reds, and the search for a Mendelian formula becomes very elusive. 
If we turn from the possible ingredients of the shorthorn breed to the history 
of its origin we find matters still more difficult to disentangle. 
There appears, by the will of John Percy of Harum, to have been a breed of 
shorthorns in Yorkshire as early as 1400, and these were not whole colour. In 
' Their nearest Continental cousins to-day are the German Flcck-Vieh. 
