in our limited island at
the same period! What a strange climate it must have been to suit them
all!

Professor Nilsson, who has paid great attention to fossil oxen, mentions
a skull of this species which must have belonged to an animal more than
twelve feet in length from the nape to the root of the tail, and six
feet and a half in height. Again, the skull of a cow in the British
Museum, figured by Professor Owen, measures thirty inches from the crown
to the tips of the jaws! What a beast must this have been! Would not the
slaughter of such a "Dun Cow" as this in single combat have been an
exploit worthy of a doughty earl?

That this ancient fossil bull was really contemporary with man in
Scandinavia is proved by evidence which is irrespective of the question
of its identity with Caesar's Urus. For one of Professor Nilsson's
specimens "bears on its back a palpable mark of a wound from a javelin.
Several celebrated anatomists and physiologists, among whom," he says,
"I need only mention the names of John Mueller, of Berlin, and Andreas
Retzius, of Stockholm, have inspected this skeleton, and are unanimous
in the opinion that the hole in question upon the backbone is the
consequence of a wound, which, during the life of the animal, was made
by the hand of man. The animal must have been very young, probably only
a calf, when it was wounded. The huntsman who cast the javelin must have
stood before it. It was yet young when it died, probably not more than
three or four years old."

We may, then, assume as certain that the vast _Bos primigenius_ of
Western Europe lived as a wild animal contemporaneously with man; and as
almost certain (assuming its identity with the _Urus_) that it continued
to be abundant as late as the Christian era.

The _Bos frontosus_ is a middling-sized bovine. "Its remains," says
Professor Nilsson, "are found in turf-bogs in Southern Scandinavia, and
in such a state as plainly shews that they belonged to a more ancient
period than that in which tame cattle existed in Sweden. This species
lived in Scandinavia contemporaneously with the _Bos primigenius_, and
the _Bison Europaeus_.... If ever it was tamed, and thereby in the course
of time contributed to form some of the tame races of cattle, it must
have been the small-horned, often hornless, breed, which is to be found
in the mountains of Norway, and which has a high protuberance between
the setting-on of the horns above the nape."

This specie