

or Fossil Elk of Ireland. 31 g 



considerable resolution for the attack, and furnished with 

 strong fangs for the hold." But with regard to the peculiar 

 " tuneable cry," — the " sweet thunder" emitted from the 

 throats of this race of dogs during the pursuit, Mr Whittaker 

 is not so perspicuous. We may suppose, if we choose to adopt 

 the same hypothetical trace of reasoning, that it would be avail- 

 ed of to drive the animal by alarm into soft boggy places or 

 dense thickets, where, being entangled either by his feet or his 

 horns, he would be the more easily destroyed. In the case of 

 the Canadian elk, which is also the tenant of marshes, the 

 Indians, by the assistance of dogs, chace him into the water, 

 where he is dispatched by spears aimed at him from canoes ; 

 (See Carver's Travels, p. 272 ;) and as canoes resembling the 

 American ones have been extracted froni the nearly extinct 

 lake of Martonmere in Lancashire, near to which gigantic 

 horns have also been found, it is no extravagant supposition, 

 upon the principle that the manners of a savage people are in 

 all ages and countries the same, that a similar mode would be 

 occasionally resorted to for the destruction of the large horned 

 Cervus of our own country, while dwelling among his ancient 

 swamps and morasses. 



A second cause contributing to the extinction of the Cervus 

 euryceros, was the estimation in which all the remarkable ani- 

 mals inhabiting Gaul as well as other regions were held by 

 the Romans for the use of the public games. The number 

 in requisition for this purpose is well known to have been 

 astonishingly great. Hadrian in one day slaughtered a thou- 

 sand beasts ; Titus, five thousand. The Emperor Gordian, 

 in inventing a new kind of spectacle, had a wood planted in 

 the Circus, into which there was turned out wild horses, wild 

 asses, wild sheep, wild boars, elks, bulls, ostriches, and ibices, 

 and among these two hundred deer and two hundred Cervi 

 palmati ; and in a subsequent spectacle of the same kind 

 given by Probus, among a similar variety of animals no less 

 than one thousand stags and one thousand deer were at the 

 same time exhibited ; the people being allowed, as an addi- 

 tion to the sport, to enter the wood and take from thence any 

 which they had the courage to face. That many of these 



