The cattle in all the parks are white; but, from the occasional appearance of dark-coloured calves, it is extremely doubtful whether the aboriginal _Bos primigenius_ was white. The following facts, however, show that there is a strong, though not invariable, tendency in wild or escaped cattle, under widely different conditions of life, to become white with coloured ears. If the old writers Boethius and Leslie[195] 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. The primæval forest formerly extended across the whole country from Chillingham to Hamilton, and Sir Walter Scott used to maintain that the cattle still preserved in these two parks, at the two extremities of the forest, were remnants of its original inhabitants; and this view certainly seems probable. In Wales,[196] 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, 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.