EXTINCT BRITISH ANIMALS. INTRODUCTION. THE interest which attaches to the history of extinct British animals can only be equalled by the regret which must be felt, by all true naturalists, at their disappearance beyond recall from our fauna. It is a curious reflection at the present day, as we pass over some of the wilder parts of the country, that at one time these same moors and woods and glens, which we now traverse so securely, were infested to such an extent with ferocious animals, that a journey of any length was, on this account, attended with considerable danger. Packs of wolves, which usually issued forth at night to ravage the herdsman's flocks, were ever ready to attack the solitary herdsman, or unwary traveller on foot, who might venture to pass within reach of their hiding-places. In the oak woods and amongst the reed-beds which fringed the meres, wild-boars lurked while munching their store of acorns, or wallowing, as is their wont, in lacustrine mire, while they searched for the palatable roots of aquatic B plants. Many a traveller then had cause to rue the sudden and unexpected rush of some grand old patriarch of the "sownder," who, with gnashing tusks, charged out upon the invader of his domain, occasionally unhorsing him, and not unfrequently inflicting severe injuries upon his steed. In the wilder recesses of the forest, and amongst the caves and boulders of the mountain side, the bear, too, had his stronghold, and though exterminated at a much earlier period, long co-existed with the animals we have named; while in a few favoured localities in the west and north, the harmless, inoffensive beaver built its dam, and dived in timid haste at the approach of an intruder. At the present day it is difficult to realize such a state of things, unless we consider at the same time the aspect and condition of the country in which these animals lived, and the remarkable physical changes which have since taken place. Nothing we have now left can give us any idea of the state of things then; not the moors of North Derbyshire, West Yorkshire, and Lancashire, the wild wastes of Westmoreland, Cumberland, and Northumberland, nor even the extensive deer-forests and moors of the Scottish Highlands; for the pathless woods which then covered a great part of these districts are all gone, and so also are the thick forests which, outside of but connected with them, skirted these higher grounds. The advance of man and the progress of cultivation has destroyed most of these wild woods, but it was not so in late Saxon and in early Norman times. Even in the less hilly districts more than half the country was one vast forest, and in the north at least these forests flanked the mountain ranges, extending their wild influence, and at the same time rendering them more inaccessible and wilder still. Between the tenth and twelfth centuries, great forests came up almost to the gates of London. In a curious tract entitled "Descriptio nobilissima civitatis Londoniæ," written by Fitz-Stephen, a monk of Canterbury, in 1174, it is stated that there were open meadows of pasture lands on the north of the City, and that beyond these was a great forest, in whose woody coverts lurked the stag, the hind, the wild-boar, and the bull. 66 Two-thirds, or nearly, of the county of Stafford was, even in relatively modern times, either moorland or woodland. The northern part, going nearly up to Buxton, was moorland; the central and eastern part forest. Harwood, in his edition of Erdeswick's Survey of Staffordshire," quoting Sir Simon Degge, says: The moorlands are the more northerly mountainous part of the country lying betwixt Dove and Trent; the woodlands are the more southerly level part of the country. Between the aforesaid rivers, including Needwood Forest, with all its parks, are also the parks of Wichnor, Chartley, Horecross, Bagots, Loxley, and Paynesley, which anciently were all but as one wood, that gave it the name of woodlands." Leland, about 1536, though he speaks of the woods being then much reduced, con |