Page:The Hog.djvu/19

17 boar found in the cave of Hutton, in the Mendip hills, with the true fossils of that receptacle, such as the remains of the mammoth, Spelæan bear, &c. With respect to cave-bones, however, it is sometimes difficult to produce conviction as to the contemporaneity of extinct and recent species."

This observation applies merely to cave-bones, and not to such as are imbedded in deposits with other remains.

The oldest fossil remains of the hog, from British strata, which Professor Owen has examined, were from fissures in the red crag (probably miocene) of Newbourne, near Woodbridge, Suffolk:—"They were associated with teeth of an extinct felis, about the size of a leopard, with those of a bear, and with remains of a large cervus.

These mammalian remains were found with the ordinary fossils of the red crag; they had undergone the same process of trituration, and were impregnated with the same coloring matter, as the associated bones and teeth of fishes, acknowledged to be derived from the regular strata of the red crag. These mammaliferous beds have been proved by Mr. Lyell to be older frhan the fluvio-marine, or Norwich crag, in which remains of the mastodon, rhinoceros, and horse have been discovered; and still older than the fresh-water pleistocene deposits, from which the remains of the mammoth, rhinoceros, &c., are obtained in such abundance." To this the Professor adds:"I have met with some satisfactory instances of the association of fossil remains of a species of hog with those of the mammoth, in the newer pliocene fresh-water formations of England."

The most usual situations however, in which the fossilized bones of the hog are met with, are in peat-bogs, often at the depth of many feet, and in association with the remains of the wolf, the beaver, the roebuck, and a gigantic red-deer; generally they underline the bed of peat, and rest on shell-marl or alluvium. Of the identity of these bones with those of the ordinary wild hog, all doubt has been removed by the most rigorous comparisons; nevertheless, we do not assert that no other species of sus may not have anciently existed, which, like the mammoth and the mastodon, has become extinct; we mean only to say that the bones of the sus scrofa are among the fossil remains of our island and the continent of Europe. Professor Owen gives an excellent figure of the fossil skull of a wild boar, from drift in a fissue of the free-stone quarries in the Isle of Portland. Leaving the wild hog, let us direct our attention more immediately to that breed which, time immemorial, has been reared in captivity, and valued for the sake of its flesh, prepared in different ways as food for man.

"One of the most singular circumstances," says Mr. Wilson (Quarterly Journal of Agriculture.) "in the domestic history of this animal is the immense extent of its distribution, more especially in far removed and insulated spots inhabited by semibarbarians, where