The universal geography : earth and its inhabitants

FAUNA. 27
Fauxa.
The British fauna has undergone many vicissitudes in the course of ages. Not
only have large mammals, -which we know to have been the contemporaries of pre-
historic man, perished, but even during historical times, as civilisation progressed,
and land was more and more brought under cultivation, several wild animals
have been exterminated. Of the existence of such southern types as the cave lion,
the hippopotamus, the mammoth, and hyena, or of the northern reindeer and the
great Irish deer, we only possess records furnished by deposits in caverns and river
gravels. The wild ox, a fierce and powerful animal of white colour, which
abounded in the time of the Romans, still browses in Hamilton Forest, near
Cadzow Castle, in Lanarkshire, and in a few other parks, but it is virtually extinct
as a wild animal. British bears, which excited much admiration at Rome, were
last heard of in the eleventh century, when a Gordon, as a reward for his valour in
Icilling one, was granted three bears' heads as a coat of arms. The wolf, during
Anglo-Saxon times, was a most destructive animal, and, to encourage its exter-
mination, wolves' tongues were accepted in expiation of certain crimes, and in
payment of the tribute exacted from the Welsh. But it survived, for all that, for
many centuries afterwards, and the last was killed in Scotland in 1680, and in
Ireland only in the beginning of the eighteenth century. The wild boar was
extirpated at the time of the Civil War, having been preserved up till then as a
favourite animal of chase. The beaver, even at the time when Giraldus Cambrensis
travelled in Wales, in 1188, had become scarce, and was confined to a few rivers
of that principality ; and birds, though far better able than land animals to elude
their pursuers, have become extinct almost within the memory of man. The original
capercailzie, or great cock of the wood, still frequent in Europe, and formerlj' in
the fir woods of Scotland and Ireland, has not been seen since 1760, whilst the great
bustard {Otis tarda) has disappeared more recently. The latter had its last home
on the downs of Wiltshire.
The only wild carnivorous quadrupeds still forming part of the British fauna
are the fox, the badger, the otter, the weasel, the polecat, the stoat, the marten,
and the wild cat. All of these have become scarce, and the fox, at all events,
would have been exterminated long ago, if it were not for the protection extended
to it by the lovers of field sports.
The ruminating animals are represented by the stag, or red deer, the roebuck,
and the fallow deer, the latter now extending to Ireland. The stag is confined
to the Highlands of Scotland, Exmoor Forest, and the woods of Eillarney, but
formerly its range was far more extensive. Amongst gnawing animals are the
hare, rabbit, squirrel, and dormouse, together with a large variety of rats and
mice, whilst the insect eaters include the hedgehog and the mole, which are general
in fields and heaths throughout England.
Very considerable is the number of birds, not in species only, but also in
individuals, and since legislation has spread its sheltering mantle over most of
them, the dav when British woods and fields will be without their feathered