Page:The Evolution of British Cattle.djvu/14

 it would only irritate the people of Durham to tell them that, when they set up a new cow in their cathedral in place of the one that had done duty for five hundred years, and when they took such care that "the horns were made this time of lead, lest she should ever again be reduced to the condition of a polled beast," they may have erred in assuming that the older cow had ever horns at all; although it might mollify them to know that the legendary cow that was the means of leading Saint Cuthbert's body to Durham was ornamented in a manner that neither the city nor the county of Durham need be ashamed of. And, although it may involve some risk to tell a Highland laird that the origin of his majestic breed is not "lost in the mists of antiquity," or the utilitarians of Aberdeen and Forfar that their thrifty blacks are descended from small, thinfleshed, narrow-backed, sickle-hocked, light-dun beasties, the risk may be minimised when it is shown that the cattle of the Gaelic-speaking Highlander in the west and the Scots-speaking Lowlander in the east can be traced back to those that accompanied their ancestors when they came over the North Sea a thousand years ago.

And we must play the Vandal at the very beginning with one of the most picturesque stories in which our cattle have ever played a part. Writers who have speculated upon the ancestry