Page:Early Man in Britain and His Place in the Tertiary Period.djvu/324

296 represent the extremes, from the interbreeding of which our present domestic hogs are derived. The first of these is considered by Professor Rütimeyer and Mr. Darwin to have been originally wild in Europe, because it is found along with wild animals at the bottom of peat-bogs, and because its bones are traversed by more strongly defined ridges and grooves, as in the case of wild as distinguished from domestic animals. It is certainly true that the muscular development, rendered necessary by the struggle for life between wild animals, enables us to distinguish the wolf from the dog, or the wild from the domestic oxen; but it is not a sure guide to the definition of the wild from the domestic hog, since the looseness of the texture in the bones of the hogs, and the absence of strongly pronounced ridges, are almost as great as in the elephants. Professor Rütimeyer's test will not, moreover, enable us to discriminate between the animals which have been aboriginally wild and those which have escaped from the yoke of man to revert to the feral conditions of life. In the latter case, the animal must exert its muscular powers in acquiring food and in defending itself against its enemies, by which the points d'appui of the muscles must be correspondingly strengthened. Nor can its aboriginal wildness be inferred from its wide distribution through Europe, because, at the present time, the swine introduced into North and South America and Australia by the colonists are gradually spreading over those countries. Under favourable conditions of life there is every reason to believe that it would in like manner have become wild in Europe. The enormous abundance of its remains in the Neolithic pile-dwellings, coupled with the pig-sties, and stores of acorns and beech-nuts found at Robenhausen,