Page:Early Man in Britain and His Place in the Tertiary Period.djvu/288

260 considers that the Chillingham cattle are the half-tame descendants from a long ancestry of wild British uri; and this view we shall examine in the fourteenth chapter, in dealing with the British mammalia in the Historic period. The urus, however, lived in the forests covering Central Germany as late as the sixteenth century.

The moose, or true elk, has been met with in several localities in the peat bogs of Northumberland, and in Yorkshire. In 1871 my attention was drawn to a magnificent head, with the antlers, found in 1828 near Williestruther Loch, Hawick, by Sir Walter Elliot, Bart., its present possessor. A second skull, obtained from Berwickshire, was exhibited at the British Association in Edinburgh by Dr. G. A. Smith, to whom we are indebted for an essay on these and many other specimens, which prove that the animal was by no means uncommon in North Britain. In the south it has been found only at Walthamstow, along with the goat, Celtic short-horn, and reindeer.

The reindeer occupied the same parts of Prehistoric Britain as the moose. In the south it has been found in the Thames valley, at the southern outfall near Erith, along with the beaver, Celtic short-horn, goat, horse, and a human skull, at the bottom of a layer of peat, fifteen to twenty feet in thickness; and it has been discovered under similar conditions in the excavations carried on for the Victoria Docks. Rare in England, it is proved