he
keeper, and black ears have not since reappeared. The wild white cattle in
the Duke of Hamilton's park, where I have heard of the birth of a black
calf, are said by Lord Tankerville to be inferior to those at Chillingham.
The cattle kept until the year 1780 by the Duke of Queensberry, but now
extinct, had their ears, muzzle, and orbits of the eyes black. Those which
have existed from time immemorial at Chartley; closely resemble the cattle
at Chillingham, but are larger, "with some small difference in the colour
of the ears." "They frequently tend to become entirely black; and a
singular superstition prevails in the vicinity that, when a black calf is
born, some calamity impends over the noble house of Ferrers. All the black
calves are destroyed." The cattle at Burton Constable in Yorkshire, now
extinct, had ears, muzzle, and the tip of the tail black. Those at
Gisburne, also in Yorkshire, are said by Bewick to have been sometimes
without dark muzzles, with the inside alone of the ears brown; and they are
elsewhere said to have been low in stature and hornless.[194]

The several above-specified differences in the park-cattle, slight though
they be, are worth recording, as they show that animals living nearly in a
state of nature, and exposed to nearly uniform conditions, if not allowed
to roam freely and to cross with other herds, do not keep as uniform as
truly {85} wild animals. For the preservation of a uniform character, even
within the same park, a certain degree of selection--that is, the
destruction of the dark-coloured calves--is apparently necessary.

The cattle in all the parks are white; but, from the occasional appearance
of dark-coloured calves, it is extremely doubtful whether the aboriginal
_Bos primigenius_ was white. The following facts, however, show that there
is a strong, though not invariable, tendency in wild or escaped cattle,
under widely different conditions of life, to become white with coloured
ears. If the old writers Boethius and Leslie[195] can be trusted, the wild
cattle of Scotland were white and furnished with a great mane; but the
colour of their ears is not mentioned. The primaeval forest formerly
extended across the whole country from Chillingham to Hamilton, and Sir
Walter Scott used to maintain that the cattle still preserved in these two
parks, at the two extremities of the forest, were remnants of its original
inhabitants; and this view certainly seems probable. In Wales,[196] d