between Archaeology and Geology. 251 



Human remains imbedded with those of the fossil Elk of 

 Ireland. — Of the extinct terrestrial mammalia of the British 

 Isles, the gigantic Deer, commonly known as the fossil Irish 

 Elk, is one of the most remarkable, from its magnitude and 

 the abundance and excellent state of preservation of its 

 remains. This noble animal was ten feet in height from the 

 ground to the top of its antlers, which are palmated and 

 measure fourteen feet from the extremity of one horn to the 

 other. The bones of the Irish Elk occur in the beds of marl 

 which underlie the peat-bogs, and are generally very perfect, 

 being stained more or less deeply by tannin and iron, and 

 sometimes partially in crusted with pale blue phosphate of 

 iron : even the marrow occasionally remains in the state of a 

 fatty substance, which will burn with a clear lambent flame. 

 Groups of skeletons have been found crowded together in a 

 small space, with the skulls elevated and the antlers thrown 

 back upon the shoulders, as if a herd of deer had fled for 

 shelter, or been driven into a morass and perished on the 

 spot.* 



Stone hatchets and fragments of pottery have been found 

 with the bones of this creature, under circumstances that 

 leave no doubt of a contemporaneous deposition. In the 

 county oft Cork, the body of a man, in good preservation, 

 the soft parts being converted into adipocire, was exhumed 

 from a marshy soil, beneath a peat-bog eleven feet thick : 

 the body was enveloped in a deer-skin of such large dimen- 

 sions as to lead to the conclusion that it belonged to the 

 extinct Elk.t 



A rib of this animal has been found in which there is a 

 perforation evidently occasioned by a pointed instrument 

 while the individual was alive ; for there is an eflusion of 

 callus or new osseous substance, which could only have re- 

 sulted from a foreign body having remained in the wound 



* Skeletons of Mastodons have been found in the United States in like cir- 

 cumstances; and very recently remains of the colossal struthious birds of New 

 Zealand, the Moa, or Dinornis, have been discovered by my eldest son, >rr 

 Walter Mautrll, in a morass under similar conditions. 



t Jameson's Translation of Cuvier's Theory of the Earth. 



