I have omitted to enumerate in the list of Herbivora two half-jaws of a Field Mouse (Campagnol), and the calcaneum of a Hare, which may have been accidentally introduced independently of human agency.
It is well known that an aversion to the flesh of the Hare, is still more general than that against pork. The Hare was regarded as impure by several of the nations of antiquity. Cæsar (De Bell. Gallic. lib. v. c. 12) states that among the inhabitants of Britain the use of its flesh as food was forbidden.[1] The Laplanders at the present day always regard it with horror, and among several nations of our part of Europe the flesh of the Hare is still despised. The remains of the Hare and Rabbit are very abundant in the ossiferous breccias and in many of the caves in the Pyrenees; but I have met with no traces of their existence in the lower grotto of Massat, nor have their remains been noticed in other caverns which appear to have been inhabited exclusively by man. The bones of the Hare are not mentioned among those of the numerous animals recognized in the Danish Kitchen-middens,[2] nor have any been found below the lacustrine habitations of Switzerland belonging to the various ages of Stone, Bronze, and Iron.
With respect to the Horse, it appears from the broken and comminuted state of his bones, resembling that in which those of the ruminants are found, that his flesh entered largely into the food of the aborigines of Aurignac. Nevertheless, at Massat, a station a little less ancient, the bones of the Horse are entirely ab- sent, whilst in the cavern of Bise, which was used as a habitation by man at a period when the Reindeer still lived in the south of France, ihe broken bones of the Horse were, according to M. Tournal, equally abundant with those of the ruminants. The Sarmatians, says an ancient historian, were distinguished from other nations, and in particular from the Celts, by their taste and predilection for the blood and flesh of the Horse, and for Mare's milk. The Horse is wanting in the Stone age in Switzerland and in Denmark. Nevertheless, in Switzerland, in the 10th century of our era, horse-flesh was served at the table of the monks of St. Gall, at a period, when amongst other European nations its use as food was forbidden under pain of excommunication.
- ↑ Though he states, nevertheless, that the Britons bred the Hare, Fowl, and Goose, though forbidden to use them as food, "animi, voluptatisque causi."
- ↑ Vid. Nat. Hist. Rev. 1861, p. 489.
flesh of the Wild Boor or of the Pig. Their flesh, it is well known, was excluded from the diet of the Egyptians and of the Jews, who, nevertheless, had domesticated the species. The Scythians, according to Herodotus, abstained from the flesh of the Hog, and the Gallo-Greeks held it in equal aversion. How can the fact be explained, then, that the ancient Gauls, who had affinities with both those people, used pork as a considerable part of their food? Observations made in the ancient stations of the aborigines of Denmark, and beneath the lacustrine habitations of the Stone period in Switzerland, have shown that those primitive races also fed largely upon the flesh of the Wild Boar.
