Two Spireogs[49] from Sliabh Cleath, Two Grey Mice from Limerick.
"Two Corncrakes from the Banks of Shannon,
Two Wagtails from the brinks of Birra,
Two Curlews from the Harbour of Galway,
Two Sgreachógs[50] from Muirtheimhne.
"Two Geilt Glinnes[51] from Glenn-a-Smoil, Two Jackdaws from great Ath Mogha, Two fleet Onchus[52] from Loch Con, Two Cats out of the Cave of Cruachain.
"Two Goats from Sith Gabhran,
Two Pigs[53] of the Pigs of Mac Lir, A Ram and Ewe both round and red, I brought with me from Aengus.
"I brought with me a Stallion and a Mare,
From the beautiful stud of Manannan,
A Bull and a white Cow from Druim Cain,
Which were given me by Muirn Munchain."
No known allusion occurs in this poem to the Giant Deer.[54] First, however, we must remember that no small number of the animals mentioned are quite unrecognisable; and that of those names to which an explanation is given, many are probably incorrectly rendered. Secondly, if it could be absolutely shewn that no allusion exists to that fine beast, it would not at all disprove its existence a thousand years before. Supposing that the Megaceros became extinct soon after the colonisation of Ireland, and that this was several centuries before the Christian era, the distinctive name by which it had been known might well have died out and become extinct also, among a people unacquainted with letters. Or if a dim tradition of the animal and of its name still lingered here and there, it might well be omitted from a catalogue which professed to give the creatures actually collected in a living state at a given period. It would have been interesting to have been able to identify the Great Elk, but its introduction would have been a glaring anachronism.
The enumeration of nearly a hundred and sixty quadrupeds and birds either indigenous to or naturalised in Ireland at so early a period, possesses, I say, a peculiar interest.
If the editor's suggestion is correct, that the Echtach was a bovine animal, then we have three distinct mentions of this family in the poem—the Wild Oxen, the Echtachs, and the Bull and White Cow. The second and third of these were probably domesticated animals; the first one expressly "Wild." Now at least five distinct species of Oxen are known to have inhabited Europe and the British Isles during the later periods of the Tertiary era, which have been named respectively, Bison priscus, Bos primigenius, frontosus and longifrons, and Ovibos moschatus. Of these, skulls of Bos frontosus and B. longifrons have been dug up in some numbers in Ireland. Some of these bear, in the perforation of the forehead, evident proof of having been slaughtered secundum artem, and therefore of having been domesticated. But one large skull of the longifrons type, now in the Museum of the Royal Irish Academy, has a cut in the forehead, into which can be accurately fitted several of the narrow bronze "celts," or arrow-heads so frequently dug up in Ireland; a pretty fair proof that this animal was killed by the hunter's arrow, and was therefore wild.
No bovine animals of the true taurine race are now known to exist in an aboriginally wild state; but at the epoch of our earliest historical knowledge of central and western Europe it was far otherwise. Cæsar, describing, under the name of Urus, certain wild oxen of the great Hercynian forest, says, "These Uri are little inferior to elephants in size, but are bulls in their nature, colour, and figure. Great is their strength, and great their swiftness, nor do they spare man or beast when once they have caught sight of him. These, when trapped in pitfalls, the hunters unsparingly kill. The youths, exercising themselves by this sort of hunting, are hardened by the toil, and those among them who have killed most, bringing with them the horns, as testimonials, acquire great praise. But these Uri cannot be habituated to man, nor made tractable, not even when taken young. The great size of the horns, as well as the form and quality of them, differs much from those of our oxen."
It is probable that this race extended widely over Europe, and even into Asia. Herodotus mentions Macedonian wild oxen, with exceedingly large (ὑπερμεγαθια) horns; and Philip of Macedon killed a wild bull in Mount Orbela, which had made great havoc, and produced much terror among the inhabitants; its spoils he hung up in the Temple of Hercules. The Assyrian artists delighted to sculpture on the royal bas-reliefs of Nineveh the conquest of the wild bull by the prowess of their Nimrod monarchs, and the figures, in their minute anatomical characters, well agree with the descriptions and remains of the European Urus. The large forest that surrounded ancient London was infested with boves sylvestres among other wild beasts, and it is probable that these were Uri. The legendary exploit of Guy, Earl of Warwick, in freeing the neighbourhood from a terrible dun cow, whether historically true or not, shews the existence of formidable wild bovines in the heart of England, and the terror they inspired among the people. The family of Turnbull, in Scotland, are traditionally said to owe their patronymic to a hero who turned a wild bull from Robert the Bruce, when it had attacked him while hunting.
What has become of the terrible Uri which lived in Europe at the commencement of the Christian era? Advancing civilisation has rooted them out, so that no living trace of them remains, unless the cream-white breed which is preserved in a semi-wild state in some of our northern parks be their representatives; or, as is not improbable, their blood may still circulate in our domestic oxen.
Yet there is no doubt of the identity of a species found abundantly in Britain in the Tertiary deposits, and named by Owen Bos primigenius, with the Urus of Cæsar. This fossil bull was as certainly contemporary in this island with the elephant, and the hyena, and the baboon, and, strange to say, with the reindeer, and the musk-ox, too—thus combining a tropical, a temperate, and an arctic fauna in our limited island at the same period! What a strange climate it must have been to suit them all!
Professor Nilsson, who has paid great attention to fossil oxen, mentions a skull of this species which must have belonged to an animal more than twelve feet in length from the nape to the root of the tail, and six feet and a half in height. Again, the skull of a cow in the British Museum, figured by Professor Owen, measures thirty inches from the crown to the tips of the jaws! What a beast must this have been! Would not the slaughter of such a "Dun Cow" as this in single combat have been an exploit worthy of a doughty earl?
That this ancient fossil bull was really contemporary with man in Scandinavia is proved by evidence which is irrespective of the question of its identity with Cæsar's Urus. For one of Professor Nilsson's specimens "bears on its back a palpable mark of a wound from a javelin. Several celebrated anatomists and physiologists, among whom," he says, "I need only mention the names of John Müller, of Berlin, and Andreas Retzius, of Stockholm, have inspected this skeleton, and are unanimous in the opinion that the hole in question upon the backbone is the consequence of a wound, which, during the life of the animal, was made by the hand of man. The animal must have been very young, probably only a calf, when it was wounded. The huntsman who cast the javelin must have stood before it. It was yet young when it died, probably not more than three or four years old."
We may, then, assume as certain that the vast Bos primigenius of Western Europe lived as a wild animal contemporaneously with man; and as almost certain (assuming its identity with the Urus) that it continued to be abundant as late as the Christian era.
The Bos frontosus is a middling-sized bovine. "Its remains," says Professor Nilsson, "are found in turf-bogs in Southern Scandinavia, and in such a state as plainly shews that they belonged to a more ancient period than that in which tame cattle existed in Sweden. This species lived in Scandinavia contemporaneously with the Bos primigenius, and the Bison Europæus.
