Page:Early Man in Britain and His Place in the Tertiary Period.djvu/326

298 over the latter continent. Its nearest living analogues in the wild state, at the present time, are some of the smaller oxen of Southern Asia, but it has not as yet been traced, with any certainty, to any one breed of wild cattle.

The second race of cattle, or the Bos frontosus, is allied to the Celtic short-horn, according to Nilsson, and, according to Rütimeyer, to the urus. The skull of the animal has been so modified by the development of a frontal protuberance between the horncores, to which the race owes its name, that, in my opinion, it cannot with any certainty be assigned to either. It is probably a mere link in the series by which the one graduates into the other, and may be the result of a cross between the two. What careful selection will effect in modifying the cranial characters may be gathered from the fact that the polled Galloway cattle have lost their horns and acquired a frontal protuberance within so short a time as eighty years. From the small development of the horncores, it is probably more closely allied to the Celtic short-horn than to the urus.

The third or large domestic ox (Bos taurus) may have been derived from the wild urus which inhabited Europe in the Pleistocene and Prehistoric ages, and as late as the sixteenth century after Christ. Nevertheless, from its appearing in the domestic state along with non-European animals, it is probable that it was introduced as a breed already in the service of man. According to