Boyd Dawkins believes that the park-cattle are descended from anciently domesticated, and not truly wild animals; and from the occasional appearance of dark-coloured calves, it is improbable that the aboriginal _Bos primigenius_ was white. It is curious what a strong, though not invariable, tendency there is in wild or escaped cattle to become white with coloured ears, under widely different conditions of life. If the old writers Boethius and Leslie[52] 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. In Wales,[53] during 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, 150 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 shorthorn 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 brownish-red.[54] 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.”[55] 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,[56] 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 Usborn, 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 a peculiar colour. It is worth