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not only once a British, but a Yorkshire ruminant. By the 
casual visit of an intelligent person to the limestone Caves 
near Settle, we owe the discovery that the tiger, bear, 
hyaona, and wild boar, once roamed over the romantic hills 
and dales of the West Riding of Yorkshire ; and lastly, to a 
similar cause in examining a gravel pit at Maidenhead, 
in Kent, in 1855, it was ascertained that the musk ox, now 
only a denizen of the most dreary regions in the Arctic 
Circle, was once a British animal, coeval with the elephant.* 
As the identification of a single bone of anomalous character 
may be the means of throwing much light upon the former 
animals of a district, and also of adding very considerably to 
our knowledge of the succession of life on the surface of the 
earth in past ages, it is of the utmost importance that 
no circumstance, however trifling in itself, which affords 
evidence of such a changing scene, should be allowed to pass 
unrecorded. I have, therefore, much pleasure in being able 
to state, that to the list of mammalia formerly natives 
of the Yorkshire hills must now be added the Roebuck, the 
most northern species of the family at present existing in 
Britain. In a collection of bones, pottery, and other articles 
recently exhumed from one of the chambers of the 
Dowkabottom Cave in Craven, and transmitted to me by 
* In allusion to this last ruminant, Professor Owen observes : — " In the 
Musk Buffalo encountered by our enterprising and much enduring 
Arctic Explorers of Melville Island and Baring's Island, we have the living 
exemplification of the slight and superficial modifications which enable one 
species to find its appropriate theatre of existence in a far different latitude 
from the rest of its congeners. Ought we to have been much more surprised 
if some individuals, some lingering remnants of the species of the two- 
horned woolly rhinoceros, or even of the equally warmly clad mammoth 
had been met with in the same rarely visited region of North America, 
deriving their subsistence from the thick forests near the Mackenzie, or 
resorting to the scattered clumps of spruce fir that skirt the barren ground 
between the 60th and 6Gth parallels of north latitude ? The conclusion from 
present evidence appears to be that the circumstances which have brought 
about the extinction (probably gradual) of the Northern rhinoceros and 
elephant have not yet effected that of the contemporary species of Arctic 
buffalo."— Geological Journal, vol. 1850. p. 130. 
