Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/393

 Correspondence. 353

Arctic regions, white is a colour foreign to wild animal life on the globe. Then the true Bos Primigenius or urus, which roamed free through the forests of Central Europe and was hunted, we learn from contemporary accounts, in the Middle Ages, was, according to Herberstein, entirely black with a line down the back having white blended with it. Urus horns also differ from those of white cattle, for while the horns of the latter are upright and upturned and lying approximately in the plane of the occipital region, the horns of the urus are very long and curved first forward and downwards and only upturned at the end, curving forward in the plane of the animal's back.

Instead of being wild animals these white cattle were, I think, a special breed, valued and bred in rude domestication for a definite purpose. We are told that the Druids, clothed in white, cut the mistletoe with a golden sickle, and that it was caught in a long white cloak and carried home on a wagon drawn by two snow-white bulls which had never felt the yoke. Here we find white cattle employed for a definite purpose. I shall be obliged if favoured with any reference as to the traditional employment of white cattle in pre-Roman days, not only as regards the mistletoe ceremony but in any other Druidical observance in England or elsewhere. Coming to the Roman period, white cattle would be in demand for sacrifices to the upper cult. Have we any tradition, superstition, custom, or saying pointing to the use of sacrificial white cattle, which has come to us from the period of Roman occupation? The sacrifice of bulls must have taken a strong hold in Britain, for we read of bulls being killed " as an alms and oblation to St. Cuthbert " in the twelfth century at Kirkcudbright ; and in Mitchell's Past in the Present an extract is given from the records of the Presbytery of Dingwall, which shows that this body met on 5th September, 1656, to inquire into the backsliding of a parish within its bounds, and they found " amongst uthcr abhominable and heathenische practices that the people in thai place were accustomed to sacrifice bulls at a certaine tyme uppon the 25 of August." I shall be much obliged if I am favoured with references to similar practices in other parts of the country and to references of a later date, also to any references where colour of the animal is noted. I make this request, for I think there can be no doubt that some customs, traditions, or sayings which point to the use of white sacrificial bulls, or cattle generally,

VOL. X, 2 A