THE EXTINCT BRITISH WOLF. 
405 
and veracity that a wolf was killed in the Wicklow mountains 
so recently as 1770.” 
A few years since, Sir J. Emerson Tennent wrote to a con- 
temporary on this subject as follows : — 
66 Waringstown, in the county Down, on the confine of the 
county of Armagh, takes its name from the family of Waring, 
which, in the reign of Queen Mary, fled to Ireland from Lan- 
cashire to avoid the persecution of the Lollards. At the close 
of the seventeenth century the Waring of that day was a mem- 
ber of the Irish Parliament ; and his eldest son, Samuel Waring, 
was bom about the year 1699, and died at a very advanced age 
in 1793. He was succeeded by his nephew, the Very Reverend 
Holt Waring, Dean of Dromore, who was born in 1766, and 
whom I had the honour to know. With him I happened to be 
travelling through the Mourne mountains, in the county of 
Down, on our way to the Earl of Roden’s, about the year 1834 
or 1835, when the conversation turning upon the social condition 
of Ireland in the previous century, he told me that a foal be- 
longing to his uncle had been killed by a wolf in the stable at 
Waringstown, and that he, when a boy, had heard the occurrence 
repeatedly adverted to in the family circle. The dean was a 
man of singularly acute mind and accurate memory, and unless 
this statement of his be altogether a delusion, this would seem 
to be the last recorded appearance of a wolf in Ireland.” 
The last piece of evidence collected has reference to a com- 
munication which appeared in “The Zoologist” for 1862 
(p. 7996), under the heading, “ Wolf Days of Ireland.” On 
applying to the writer, Mr. Jonathan Grrubb, of Sudbury, for 
further particulars, he obligingly replied in a letter, dated 
June 6, 1877, as follows: — 
66 I am now in my seventieth year. My father, who was bom 
in 1767, used to tell the wolf stories to us when we were children. 
His mother — my grandmother — related them to him. She was 
born in 1731. Her maiden name was Malone ; and her uncles, 
from whom she received her information, were the actors in the 
scenes described, at Ballyroggin, county Kildare. She remem- 
bered one of them, James Malone, telling her how his brother 
came home one night on horseback pursued by a pack of wolves, 
who overtook him, and continued leaping on to the hind quarters 
of his horse till he reached his own door, crying out, 6 Oh ! 
James, James ! my horse is ate with the wolves.’ ” 
The precise date of this occurrence cannot now be fixed ; but 
it seems plain that wolves existed in Kildare during the first 
quarter of the eighteenth century, and perhaps as late as 1721. 
To sum up. So far as can be now ascertained, it appears 
that the wolf became extinct in England during the reign of 
Henry VII. ; that it survived in Scotland until 1743 ; and that 
