FORMER EXISTENCE OF THE ROE-DEER IN ENGLAND. 137 
which, were once plentiful in England, the smallest should be 
the first to become extinct. 
One would have supposed that its diminutive size, its timid 
disposition, and retiring habits, combined with fewer require- 
ments as regards food, would have enabled it to linger on and 
hold its own in the remnants of our ancient forests, and even in 
smaller coverts where its allies, the Red- deer and the Fallow- 
deer, from their conspicuously larger size could not hope to escape 
detection. This might have been so had it not been for the 
important circumstance that both the Red-deer and Fallow- 
deer were at an early period taken directly under man’s pro- 
tection by being enclosed in parks on the first distribution of 
forest lands. 
The Roe-deer not only disdained such protection, no ordinary 
park-paling being high enough to keep it within bounds, but its 
wandering disposition necessitating a great tract of country to 
roam over, rendered it unable to brook the confinement to which 
the larger animals soon became accustomed. Under these cir- 
cumstances other causes soon supervened to bring about its 
extinction. Deprived of the protection afforded to other deer, 
the destruction of its native woods and the gradual cultivation 
of moors and waste lands placed it more than ever at the 
mercy of its enemies. It would be easily approached and 
killed, its size rendering it a good mark; and on the other hand 
its slow rate of increase (bringing forth but once a-year, and 
having usually but two fawns at a birth), would be insufficient 
to counteract the destruction to which it became continually 
exposed. 
That the Roe-deer must at one time have been plentiful in 
England, and very generally dispersed throughout the country, 
is made apparent in a variety of ways. 
To turn, first, to the geological evidence. Its remains have 
been discovered in such widely distant and dissimilar situations 
as in the barrows and bone-caves of Derbyshire,* in the peat of 
Berkshire and Hants, f in the deposits of the Thames Talley, £ 
in the lower marl of the Yale of Kennet,§ and in the caverns of 
Devonshire.!! That it was at one time a native of the eastern 
counties of England may be inferred from the discovery of its 
horns and bones mingled with those of the Red-deer and other 
animals, now extinct, in the soil of an ancient submerged forest 
* Pennington, Notes on the Burrows and Bone-caves of Derbyshire, 1877. 
t Collet, Phil. Trans. 1757, p. 109; Pennant, Brit. Zool. yoI. i. p. 60. 
t Boyd Dawkins, Pop. Sci. Be v. Jan. 1868 ; Woodward, Geol. Mag. Sept. 
1869, and Walker, Trans. Essex Nat. Field Club , p. 38. 
§ Sussex Archceol. Coll. xxiv. p. 160. 
|| Bellamy, Nat. Hist. South Devon , p. 440 ; Brit. Assoc. Report , 1869,. 
p. 208 . 
