ON THE MAMMALS OF LEICESTERSHIRE. 
301 
ON “THE MAMMALS OF LEICESTERSHIRE.” * 
BY F. T. MOTT, F.R.G.S. 
The Mammals which still run wild in this 
county are few in species and of small size. 
It must always be so, wherever civilized 
man has long been settled, and has enclosed 
and cultivated the land. Man is himself the 
Royal Family among the mammals, and as his 
relatives compete more closely with him for 
those products which he most desires, than any other class of 
animals does, he either exterminates them or reduces them to 
slavery under the name of domestication. There was a time 
when the Mammoth and the Rhinoceros browsed in Charnwood 
Forest and came down to the Soar to drink, and the great 
Cave Lion hunted the Red Deer in the Soar Valley. This 
was not so very long ago, 50,000 years perhaps. Those 
mighty mammals were masters of the country till man found 
his way into it, and the flooding of the Channel cut off 
communication with the Continent. Then there came a long 
fight for mastery between the huge quadrupeds and the clever 
biped, and they gradually disappeared before neolithic man, 
as the Red Indian disappears before the whites. There 
still remained, however, among the larger quadrupeds the 
wolf, the boar, the ox, the sheep, the goat, and the deer, as 
wild inhabitants of the county, and these held their own 
until quite modern times, becoming extinct as wild animals 
only about 500 years ago. The fox is now the largest of our 
twenty-five or twenty-six Leicestershire mammals. But when 
the progress of civilisation lias put down the barbaric sport 
of fox-hunting, he also will be rapidly exterminated. As to 
* the smaller mammals, such as the mouse, the rat, and the 
weasel, they are still able to foil man’s efforts to destroy them. 
Propagating with great rapidity, and concealing themselves 
in burrows and in the dense vegetable undergrowth which 
covers the earth like a mat, they still possess the land, to the 
horror of the gamekeepers and the delight of naturalists. 
The accompanying table shows the relation of the 
British and Leicestershire Mammalian Faunas to that of the 
whole world. It will be seen that of the eleven modern 
orders, excluding man, six are represented in Britain, and 
four in our county at the present time. 
★ tt 
Transactions of Section D of the Leicester Literary and Philo¬ 
sophical Society. Read January 16tli, 1884. 
