Lake-dwellings, the horn cores curve forwards without either bending downwards or upwards, and the frontal region is long and relatively flat. As the cannon bones from Newstead are shorter and finer than those from Schlossberg and certain other Neolithic settlements on the Continent, the Scottish variety of the Celtic ox was probably unusually small.
At Newstead, as at Bar Hill, there were polled cattle. One of the Newstead skulls without horn cores might have belonged to a small race allied to the modern Galloway breed (Plate XCVII., Fig. 1); in another the 'intercornual' ridge projects upwards and forwards to form a mesial process (Plate XCVII., Fig. 2). As the intercornual ridge projects slightly upwards and forwards in certain Celtic short-horn skulls, 'Bos longifrons' may have in part descended from an Oriental race characterised by a long forward projecting intercornual process.
Now that much attention is being directed to the coat colour of cattle, it may not be out of place to ask, Of what colour was the Celtic short-horn—'the native breed with which we must start in all our speculations as to the origin and development of British oxen'? The small ox of the Lake-dwellings has been described by some as of a grey or brown colour, by others as black, red, or brindled. In all probability the colour of the Celtic ox varied partly owing to artificial and partly to natural selection. In Scotland the coat was probably as a rule dark brown or black relieved by a broad reddish dorsal band.
Up to the end of the seventeenth century the cattle in the 'Celtic fringe' were usually black or dark brown, and they continued to be 'black' in the Western Islands and Highlands of Scotland up to the end of the eighteenth century. Prof. Walker, in his History of the Hebrides, frequently refers to the black cattle—he mentions, e.g., that in 1764 a farmer in Skye had 160 head of black cattle. During the seventeenth century very little provision was made for feeding cattle during winter, with the result that in severe winters many perished. It is stated that during the unusually hard winter of 1673 most of the cattle in England perished.
In Scotland during the eighteenth century the cattle in the Highlands were allowed to lie abroad all the year round, and had little or nothing to eat during winter and spring but what they could pick up in the fields. One result of this treatment was that half or even more sometimes perished; another was that many of the cows from poverty and weakness only bred once in two years; moreover, calves dropped before March apparently often succumbed for want of nourishment. It may be safely assumed that in the struggle for existence in the Highlands and Islands during the eighteenth century, the large breeds introduced from the Continent by the Romans, Saxons, Danes, and others would be first eliminated, and that as a rule only the small, hardy, native, indigenous Celtic short-horn would be left. Further support of the view that the Celtic short-horn was dark brown and black we have in the appearance now and again of a small brown or black calf; especially in Welsh and Highland herds—an obvious reversion to a once widely distributed native race.
By way of throwing light on the colour of the ancient British cattle, I have made
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