The last wolf that has roamed our island had been slain in Scotland a short time before the close of the reign of Charles the Second. But many breeds, now extinct, or rare, both of quadrupeds and birds, were still [in 1685] common. The fox, whose life is now, in many counties, held almost as sacred as that of a human being, was then considered as a mere nuisance (Macaulay’s ‘History of England’, chapter III, 2, published 1848).