The principal changes in the fauna of Great Britain during the historic age are the extinction of the bear, wolf, beaver, reindeer, and wild boar, and the introduction of the domestic fowl, the pheasant, fallow-deer, ass, the domestic cat, the larger breed of oxen, and the common rat; and as this took place at different times, it is obvious that these animals enable us to ascertain the approximate date of the deposit in which their remains happen to occur. And for this purpose the following table[42] may be consulted:—
Some or other of these animals are met with in the peat-bogs and alluvia, and in caves, but far more abundantly in the refuse-heaps left behind by man, by whom they have here been used either for service or for food.
The disappearance of certain wild species, from the areas in which they lived on the continent, in historic times, has not been ascertained so accurately as in this country, and many animals, which have become extinct in our restricted and highly-cultivated island, are still to be found in the continental forests, morasses, and mountains. The brown bear is still to be met with in the Pyrenees, the Vosges, and in the wilder and more inaccessible portions of northern, middle, and southern Europe. The wolf still survives in France, and during the late German war preyed upon the slain after some of the battles. It, as well as the wild boar, ranges throughout the uncultivated regions of the continent. The beaver still lives in the waters of the Rhone, as well as in the rivers of Lithuania and of Scandinavia, and the reindeer, now restricted to the regions north of a line passing east and west through the Baltic, extended further south, in sufficient numbers to be remarked by Cæsar, among the more noteworthy animals living in the great Hercynian forest, which overshadowed northern Germany in his days. This forest also afforded shelter to the true elk and the bison, both of which still live in Lithuania, as well as to the Urus, which was hunted by Charles the Great, near Aachen, and probably became extinct in the fifteenth or sixteenth century. The lion inhabited the mountains of southern Thrace in the days of Herodotus and of Aristotle, and became extinct in Europe between 330 B.C. and the days of Dio Chrysostom Rhetor (A.D. 100), who expressly says that there were no lions in Greece in his time. The panther also inhabited the same district when Xenophon wrote his “Treatise on Hunting.”
The fallow-deer was believed by the late Professor Edouard Lartet to have been introduced into France by the Romans. On a visit, however, to Paris in September 1873, Professor Gervais called my attention to an antler of the animal in the Jardin des Plantes, said to have been found in a refuse-heap along with axes of polished stone. It must therefore have lived in France in the Neolithic age, if it were obtained from an undisturbed deposit. It gradually spread into Germany and Switzerland, until in the eleventh century it was sufficiently abundant to be mentioned among the articles of food in a metrical grace of the monks of St. Gall.
“Imbellem damam faciat benedictio summam.”[43]
The domestic fowl is to be recognized on Gallic coins before the Roman invasion, and therefore was probably known at the very dawn of Gallic history. The larger breed of oxen, descended from the Urus type, has been known in France, Germany, Lombardy, Scandinavia, and Switzerland, in the remote division of the prehistoric age known as the Neolithic.[44] The buffalo, on the other hand, of the Roman Campagna, was introduced into Italy, according to Paulus Diaconus, in the year 596, and the domestic cat,[45] known to the Greeks from their intercourse with Egypt, became familiar to the eyes of the inhabitants of Rome and Constantinople as early as the fourth century after Christ.
It is evident from the survival of the wolf, the bear, beaver, reindeer, and the wild boar on the continent at the present time, that the chronological table which I have constructed for Britain is inapplicable to Europe in general. In the present state of our knowledge of the varying ranges of the animals, it seems impossible to form any similar scheme.
The historic caves are characterized by the presence of some of these animals, as well as of coins and pottery, and other articles by which the date of their occupation may be ascertained.