This savage animal must have early succumbed to man. The "Triads"[59] mention bears as living here before the Kymri came. The Roman poets knew of their existence here: Martial speaks of the robber Laureolus being exposed on the cross to the fangs of the Caledonian Bear; and Claudian alludes to British bears. The Emperor Claudius, on his return to Rome after the conquest of this island, exhibited, as trophies, combats of British bears in the arena. In the Penitential of Archbishop Egbert, said to have been compiled about A.D. 750, bears are mentioned as inhabiting the English forests, but they must have gradually become rare, for the chase-laws of Canute, at the beginning of the eleventh century, are silent about them. In Doomsday Book, we find incidental notice of this animal, for the city of Norwich is said to have been required to furnish a bear annually to Edward the Confessor, together with "six dogs for the bear,"—no doubt for baiting him. This seems to have been the latest trace on record of the bear in Britain; unless the tradition may compete with it, which states that one of the Gordon family was empowered by the king of Scotland to carry three bears' heads on his banner, as a reward for his prowess in slaying a fierce bear.
In Ireland it seems to have become extinct even yet earlier. Bede says the only ravenous animals in his day were the wolf and the fox; Donatus, who died in A.D. 840, distinctly says it was not a native of the island in his time; and Geraldus Cambrensis does not enumerate it as known in the twelfth century. Neither is it included in the ransom-beasts of Cailte's collection. Yet a native Irish name for the bear—Mathghambain—occurs in an old glossary[60] in the Library of Trinity College, Dublin; and the late Wm. Thomson says that a tradition is current of its having once been an Irish animal; and it is associated with the wolf as a native beast in the stories handed down from generation to generation to the present time.
The wolf, however, survived in both islands to a much later era. In the days of the Heptarchy it was a terrible pest; King Edgar commuted the punishment of certain offences into a requisition for a fixed number of wolves' tongues; and he converted a heavy tax on one of the Welsh princes into an annual tribute of three hundred wolves' heads. These laws continued to the time of Edward I., when the increasing scarcity of the animal doubtless caused them to fall into disuse. Mr Topham, in his Notes to Somerville's "Chase," says, that it was in the wolds of Yorkshire that a price was last set on a wolf's head. The last record of their occurring in formidable numbers in England is in 1281; but for three centuries after this, the mountains and forests of Scotland harboured them; for Hollinshed reports that in 1577 the wolves were very troublesome to the flocks of that country. Nor were they entirely destroyed out of this island till about a century afterwards, when the last wolf fell in Lochaber, by the hand of Sir Ewen Cameron of Lochiel. In Ireland the last wolf was slain in 1710.
Thus here we are able to lay our finger on the exact dates when a large and rapacious species of animal actually became extinct so far as the British Isles are concerned. And if the species had been confined in its geographical limits, as many other species of animals are, to one group of islands, we should know the precise date of its absolute extinction.
The Beaver was once an inhabitant of British rivers. Its remains are found in Berkshire, Cambridgeshire, Yorkshire, and elsewhere, associated with the other Mammalia of the fresh-water deposits and caves, but not in any abundance. No record of its actual existence, however, in these counties exists, nor anywhere else but in Wales and Scotland, whose mountain streams and rugged ravines afforded it shelter till after the Norman Conquest. It was very rare even then, and for a hundred years before; for the laws of Howel Dda, the Welsh king, who died in 948, in determining the value of peltry, fix the price of the beaver's skin at a hundred and twenty pence, when the skins of the stag, the wolf, the fox, and the otter, were worth only eightpence each, that of the white weasel or ermine at twelvepence, and that of the marten, at twenty-four pence. The appropriate epithet of Broad-tail (Llostllyddan) was given it by the Welsh. Giraldus Cambrensis, who travelled through Wales in 1188, gives, in his Itinerary, a short account of the beaver, but states that the river Teivy in Cardiganshire, and one other river in Scotland, were the only places in Great Britain, where it was then found. In all probability it did not long survive that century, for no subsequent notice of it as a British animal is extant. Tradition, however, still preserves the remembrance of its presence in those indelible records, names of places. "Two or three waters in the Principality," says Pennant, "still bear the name of Llyn yr afangc,—the Beaver Lake.... I have seen two of their supposed haunts: one in the stream that runs through Nant Francon; the other in the river Conwy, a few miles above Llanrwst; and both places, in all probability, had formerly been crossed by beaver-dams."
If, as naturalists of the highest eminence believe, there is specific difference between the beaver of Europe and that of America, then we may say that our species is fast passing away from the earth. A few colonies yet linger along the banks of the Danube, the Weser, the Rhone and the Euphrates, but they consist of few individuals, ever growing fewer; and the value of their fur exciting cupidity, they cannot probably resist much longer the exterminating violence of man.
The causes which led to the extinction of these animals in our islands are then obvious, and are thus playfully touched by the late James Wilson:—"The beaver might have carried on business well enough, in his own quiet way, although frequently incommoded by the love of peltry on the part of a hat-wearing people; but it is clear that no man with a small family and a few respectable farm servants, could either permit a large and hungry wolf to be continually peeping at midnight through the keyhole of the nursery, or allow a brawny bruin to snuff too frequently under the kitchen door (after having hugged the watch-dog to death) when the servant-maids were at supper. The extirpation then of at least two of these quondam British species became 'a work of necessity and mercy,' and might have been tolerated even on a Sunday, (between sermons,) especially as naturalists have it still in their power to study the habits of similar wild beasts, by no means yet extinct, in the neighbouring countries of France and Germany."[61]
Perhaps the example of recent extinction most popularly known is that of the Dodo, a very remarkable bird, which about two centuries ago existed in considerable abundance, in the isles of Mauritius, Bourbon, and Rodriguez. It was a rather large fowl, incapable of rising from the ground, by reason of the imperfect development of its wings, of massive, uncouth figure, predisposed to fatness, and noted for the sapidity of its flesh. Two skulls and two unmatched feet of this strange bird are preserved in European museums; and these shew that its nearest affinities were with the pigeon-tribe, of which we know some species of terrestrial habits, but none approaching this bird in its absolute confinement to the earth.
In the reports of numerous voyagers who visited these islands from the end of the fifteenth century to the middle of the seventeenth, we have many accounts of the appearance and habits of this bird, evidently sketched from the life. Some of the descriptions, as also the figures by which they are illustrated, are quaint enough; as, for example, that graphic sketch hit off by old Sir Thomas Herbert, who saw the bird in his travels in 1634:—
"The Dodo," he says, "comes first to our description. Here and in Dygarrois (and nowhere else that I cd ever see or heare of) is generated the Dodo. (A Portuguize name it is, and has reference to her simplenes) a bird which for shape and rareness might be call'd a Phœnix (wer't in Arabia); her body is round and extreame fat, her slow pace begets that corpulencie; few of them weigh lesse than fifty pound: better to the eye than the stomack: greasie appetites may perhaps commend them, but, to the indifferently curious, nourishment, but prove offensive. Let's take her picture: her visage darts forth melancholy, as sensible of nature's injurie in framing so great and massive a body to be directed by such small and complementall wings, as are unable to hoise her from the ground, serving only to prove her a bird; which otherwise might be doubted of: her head is variously drest, the one halfe hooded with downy blackish feathers; the other perfectly naked; of a whitish hue, as if a transparent lawne had covered it; her bill is very howked and bends downwards, the thrill or breathing place is in the midst of it; from which part to the end, the colour is a light greene mixt with a pale yellow; her eyes be round and small, and bright as diamonds; her cloathing is of finest downe, such as ye see in goslins; her trayne is (like a China beard) of three or foure short feythers; her legs thick, and black, and strong; her tallons or pounces sharp; her stomack fiery hot, so as stones and yron are easilie digested in it; in that and shape, not a little resembling the Africk oestriches: but so much, as for their more certain dyfference I dare to give thee (with two others) her representation."[62]