(present-day Hungary and Croatia) and Dacia (present-day Romania). He also gives us some dramaticised description of its composition, in which the close proximity of the forest trees causes competitive struggle among them (inter se rixantes). He mentions its gigantic oaks. But even he—if the passage in question is not an interpolated marginal gloss—is subject to the legends of the gloomy forest. He mentions unusual birds, which have feathers that "shine like fires at night". Medieval bestiaries named these birds the Ercinee. The impenetrable nature of the Hercynia Silva hindered the last concerted Roman foray into the forest, by Drusus, during 12..9 BCE: Florus asserts that Drusus invisum atque inaccessum in id tempus Hercynium saltum (Hercynia saltus, the "Hercynian ravine-land") patefecit. The isolated modern remnants of the Hercynian Forest identify its flora as a mixed one; Oscar Drude identified its Baltic elements associated with North Alpine flora, and North Atlantic species with circumpolar representatives. Similarly, Edward Gibbon noted the presence of reindeer—pseudo-Caesar's bos cervi figura—and elk—pseudo-Caesar's alces—in the forest. The wild bull which the Romans named the urus was present also, and the European bison and the now-extinct aurochs, Bos primigenius. In the Roman sources, the Hercynian Forest was part of ethnographic Germania. There is an indication that this circumstance was fairly recent; that is, Posidonius states that the Boii, were once there (as well as in Bohemia which is named for them). It is believed that before the Boii the Hercuniates tribe inhabited the area, later migrating to Pannonia in Illyria. By the middle of the first century BC, the Hercuniates were a minor tribe that was located along a narrow band of Celtic settlement close to the Danube, on the western side of the river a little way west of modern Budapest. Their name comes from an ancient proto-Indo-European word for an oak. The tribe is referred to by Pliny and Ptolemy as a civitas peregrina, a wandering tribe that had travelled to Pannonia from foreign parts. Little else is known of them save that they were issuing their own coins by the second century BC. By AD 40 the tribe was eventually subdued by Rome. Medieval period Monks sent out from Niederaltaich Abbey (founded in the eighth century) brought under cultivation for the first time great forested areas of Lower Bavaria as far as the territory of the present Czech Republic, and founded 120 settlements in the Bavarian