uring
the tenth century, some of the cattle are described as being white with red
ears. Four hundred cattle thus coloured were sent to King John; and an
early record speaks of a hundred cattle with red ears having been demanded
as a compensation for some offence, but, if the cattle were of a dark or
black colour, one hundred and fifty were to be presented. The black cattle
of North Wales apparently belong, as we have seen, to the small
_longifrons_ type: and as the alternative was offered of either 150 dark
cattle, or 100 white cattle with red ears, we may presume that the latter
were the larger beasts, and probably belonged to the _primigenius_ type.
Youatt has remarked that at the present day, whenever cattle of the
short-horn breed are white, the extremities of their ears are more or less
tinged with red.

The cattle which have run wild on the Pampas, in Texas, and in two parts of
Africa, have become of a nearly uniform dark {86} brownish-red.[197] On the
Ladrone Islands, in the Pacific Ocean, immense herds of cattle, which were
wild in the year 1741, are described as "milk-white, except their ears,
which are generally black."[198] The Falkland Islands, situated far south,
with all the conditions of life as different as it is possible to conceive
from those of the Ladrones, offer a more interesting case. Cattle have run
wild there during eighty or ninety years; and in the southern districts the
animals are mostly white, with their feet, or whole heads, or only their
ears black; but my informant, Admiral Sulivan,[199] who long resided on
these islands, does not believe that they are ever purely white. So that in
these two archipelagos we see that the cattle tend to become white with
coloured ears. In other parts of the Falkland Islands, other colours
prevail: near Port Pleasant brown is the common tint; round Mount Usborne,
about half the animals in some of the herds were lead or mouse-coloured,
which elsewhere is an unusual tint. These latter cattle, though generally
inhabiting high land, breed about a month earlier than the other cattle;
and this circumstance would aid in keeping them distinct and in
perpetuating this peculiar colour. It is worth recalling to mind that blue
or lead-coloured marks have occasionally appeared on the white cattle of
Chillingham. So plainly different were the colours of the wild herds in
different parts of the Falkland Islands, that in hunting them, as Admiral
Sulivan informs me, white sp