Lost Beasts of Britain, by Anthony Dent

The most recently-completed of my loo books is Anthony Austen Dent's Lost Beasts of Britain (1974), and a pleasure it was too, so much a pleasure that my exit from the lavatory was often delayed by some intriguing and delicious paragraph. For this I partly blame the subject matter - those animals which were once wild natives of this land and which bulk large in its placenames and folklore - but most of the responsibility for my toiletary loitering falls on Mr Dent's succulent prose, which flows so precisely, so rhythmically, so seductively, from one page and one subordinate topic to the next. This history of lost British animals - the beaver, the boar, the wild cat, and the wolf - bears witness to a countryman's knowledge of the conditions those wild animals - and their enemies - faced, combined with a lively scepticism as to what the meagre sources appear to say. It also shows that ability to write beautifully which was once the common possession, and concern, of everyone who attempted the use of the English language, and which did not confuse the vigorous beauty of clear prose with overdeveloped adjectives and clutter.

Here is the conclusion of the chapter on the wild cat. I quote it because I'm fairly sure the genetics is nonsense, yet made utterly beguiling by the personal experience, the observation, the history, and the writing:

In summer 1971 I met such a family of yard kittens in the garden of a neighbouring farm-house. Three of them, all of blotched black-and-white colour, came up to me as if to play. The fourth, though obviously of the same age, was slightly larger, dull yellowish-grey with stripes of wild pattern - that is, at right angles to the spine, two horizontal on the sides of the head and four on the crown, a thick dorsal stripe and others more or less following the lines of the ribs. This tiny tiger would have none of my company. With fine tactical sense, though unprovoked, he backed up against a spiny gooseberry bush, spat like a fourpenny firework, and displayed every tooth and every claw in his armoury, while his ears went down sideways until they formed a horizontal line on a level with the flat crown of his head - the image in miniature of the true wild cat of the woods.
     Now this shows how prepotent genetically is the wild cat. The last potential wild ancestor of this Eskdale kitten of which there are records is the Hawnby Cat, obit 1840, mentioned above. that part of Bilsdale is perhaps twenty miles away from here, along any line across the moor that a cat would be likely to take - a long journey for a cat, but not impossible under some form of duress. In any case, different stages of the journey could have been performed by successive generations of the Hawnby Cat's descendants, each one of them carrying fewer and fewer wild genes. The journey down the years is more significant, culminating in this totally wild-looking, wild-acting kitten in 1971. The cat, wild or tame, has a short breeding cycle, and litters are commonly born to females two years old. So the Eskdale kitten was about sixty-five generations in line from the Hawnby Cat, if truly descended from him. Inbreeding apart, therefore, it could have had only one wild ancestor among all its forbears in sixty-five generations; arithmetically expressed, the proportion of wild genes was one over two to the power of sixty-five. Get out your logarithm tables and you will see what sort of a vulgar fraction that is.