Page:Early Man in Britain and His Place in the Tertiary Period.djvu/287

] the museum at Dublin, which is sometimes taken to be the result of a wound from a dart, arrow, or spear, may possibly have been caused by one of the sharp tynes in a fight between two bucks. The peculiar incised bones also from Legan, County Longford, which at first sight look as if they had been cut by man, have been proved by Dr. Carte to have resulted from the friction of one bone resting on another, caused by a movement in the strata in which they were found.

The urus was comparatively abundant in Prehistoric Britain and Ireland, and its remains are met with more especially in the sub-turbary marls and in the alluvia. It is proved to have been hunted by Neolithic man by the bones and teeth in the Neolithic pit in Cissbury Camp, explored by Mr. Ernest Willett in 1874. It lived in this country at least as late as the Bronze age, since its remains occur in the refuse-heap in and around the pile dwelling in Barton Mere, near Bury St. Edmunds. From these two isolated cases of its occurrence in Britain it may be inferred that it was very rare in the Neolithic and Bronze ages; it probably was exterminated before the Historic period in this country. The "tauri sylvestres" of William Fitzstephen, in the forests then extending round London, probably did not refer to the urus, but to half-wild descendants of cattle turned out, as was then the custom, into the woodlands to feed, and not confined within the limits of fences. Mr. Darwin, however,