EXTERMINATION IN TILE OLD WORLD WITHIN HISTORIC TIMES. Since written records began, several species have vanished from the fauna of Europe, but remain elsewhere, or are preserved in carefully guarded remnants. The lion, tiger, leopard, and various wildcats once inhabited the valley of the Danube, and the lion was common there in Roman times. When the Romans first penetrated central and western Europe they found numerous not only the 'bonasus,' which we now mistakenly call the aurochs, but a race of great wild cattle. Mere remnants of these (see BISON; CATTLE) remain in a more or less impure condition on private preserves. The na tive roe and fallow deer (qq.v.) would long ago have perished had they not been protected and bred in parks and hunting forests. The chamois of the Alps survives only under legal protection, which has not sufficed to keep the ibex, now utter ly extinct. The same might be said of certain lesser animals. Brown bears existed in Scotland up to the time of Edward the Confessor, but not later, and the last reindeer disappeared from Caithness about the same time. The beaver probably remained in Scotland and Wales until the thirteenth century. Wild boars were hunted until the end of the seventeenth century, and the wolf eluded his doom much longer, the last one being killed in England during the reign of Henry VIII., in Scotland in 1740, and in Ireland
in 1775.
Asia furnishes few or no examples of animal extinction of importance since written records began, with the exception of the rhytina and a vormorant, both of which once dwelt on islands MT the coast of Kamchatka. The rhytina was a sea-cow, closely related to the manatee (q.v.), but much larger, which was confined to the Com mander Islands in Bering Sea, where it was dis covered by the expedition of Bering, which was wrecked there in 1741. During the next twenty years these islands were constantly visited by seal a ml fin• limiters, who slaughtered the animals to obtain their beef-like flesh. It has been estimated ht S10111ege• (.1aerican Naturalist, yon. xxii., Philadelphia, 1SS7), who made local investiga tions, that not more than 3000 rhythms herded there altogether, and the last one was killed about 1765. In the same island group, and no where else, there dwelt a very large but smallwinged cormorant (q.v.) called Pallas's, after the Russian naturalist, its first describer. It was stupid and slow in its movements, furnished excellent flesh, and although a few survived the visits of hungry sea•hunters until 1539, at least, the end then came.