The wolf, however, survived in both islands to a much later era. In the days of the Heptarchy it was a terrible pest; King Edgar commuted the punishment of certain offences into a requisition for a fixed number of wolves' tongues; and he converted a heavy tax on one of the Welsh princes into an annual tribute of three hundred wolves' heads. These laws continued to the time of Edward I., when the increasing scarcity of the animal doubtless caused them to fall into disuse. Mr Topham, in his Notes to Somerville's "Chase," says, that it was in the wolds of Yorkshire that a price was last set on a wolf's head. The last record of their occurring in formidable numbers in England is in 1281; but for three centuries after this, the mountains and forests of Scotland harboured them; for Hollinshed reports that in 1577 the wolves were very troublesome to the flocks of that country. Nor were they entirely destroyed out of this island till about a century afterwards, when the last wolf fell in Lochaber, by the hand of Sir Ewen Cameron of Lochiel. In Ireland the last wolf was slain in 1710. Thus here we are able to lay our finger on the exact dates when a large and rapacious species of animal actually became extinct so far as the British Isles are concerned. And if the species had been confined in its geographical limits, as many other species of animals are, to one group of islands, we should know the precise date of its absolute extinction. The Beaver was once an inhabitant of British rivers. Its remains are found in Berkshire, Cambridgeshire, Yorkshire, and elsewhere, associated with the other Mammalia of the fresh-water deposits and caves, but not in any abundance. No record of its actual existence, however, in these counties exists, nor anywhere else but in Wales and Scotland, whose mountain streams and rugged ravines afforded it shelter till after the Norman Conquest. It was very rare even then, and for a hundred years before; for the laws of Howel Dda, the Welsh king, who died in 948, in determining the value of peltry, fix the price of the beaver's skin at a hundred and twenty pence, when the skins of the stag, the wolf, the fox, and the otter, were worth only eightpence each, that of the white weasel or ermine at twelvepence, and that of the marten, at twenty-four pence. The appropriate epithet of Broad-tail (Llostllyddan) was given it by the Welsh. Giraldus Cambrensis, who travelled through Wales in 1188, gives, in his Itinerary, a short account of the beaver, but states that the river Teivy in Cardiganshire, and one other river in Scotland, were the only places in Great Britain, where it was then found. In all probability it did not long survive that century, for no subsequent notice of it as a British animal is extant. Tradition, however, still preserves the remembrance of its presence in those indelible records, names of places. "Two or three waters in the Principality," says