II
BOS LONGIFRONS
Having driven off Bos primigenius, we ought now to follow up the wild white bull that led us off the scent; but it will be more convenient to leave him alone for the present and pick him up again in his proper place.
We are told by those who collect and consider the records of the past—the geologist, the archaeologist, and the historian—that the animals that have lived in Britain and Western Europe at one time and another have all migrated thither from the East. Bos primigenius, who was one of the early arrivals, came westward just before the Pleistocene, or Glacial period—"a prolonged period of cold broken up by shorter periods of milder climate "[1]—and he lived through that period and several sections of the next, in whose elucidation the geologist and the archaeologist combine.
The earliest signs of man appear about the beginning of this next period, which is conveniently broken into sections or ages marked off
- ↑ Sir Archibald Geikie's "Class-Book of Geology," 1897.
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