within the same park, a certain degree of selection--that is, the
destruction of the dark-coloured calves--is apparently necessary.

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 (3/52. Boethius was born in 1470; 'Annals and
Mag. of Nat. Hist.' volume 2 1839 page 281; and volume 4 1849 page 424.)
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 (3/53.
'Youatt on Cattle' 1834 page 48: See also page 242, on shorthorn cattle.
Bell in his 'British Quadrupeds' page 423 states that, after long attending
to the subject, he has found that white cattle invariably have coloured
ears.), 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. (3/54. Azara