14 J. E. HAHTIlfG — ANIMALS WHICH HA YE BECOME 



beavers would still thrive in our cliraate, as we learn from geology 

 and history they formerly did. 



The Reindeer. 



About the time that the beaver was building its dams in Britain 

 there was fast becoming extinct another animal whose singular form 

 is well known to all of us, and has been so from infancy, when we 

 took up our first zoological picture-book — I mean the reindeer. 



This animal was one of the earliest arrivals on British soil after 

 the ice and snow of the Glacial epoch began to disappear, and it is 

 in caverns and river-gravels and sands of post-glacial age that Ave 

 first meet with its remains. Its abundance in British deposits of 

 this date is very remarkable. Professor Boyd Dawkins has 

 found portions of its bones and horns in no less than thirteen out of 

 twenty-one caverns examined by him, while the red-deer was only 

 found in seven; thus, contrary to what is generally assumed to be 

 the case, the reindeer predominated in numbers over the red-deer 

 at the time the British bone-caverns were being filled. 



In the post-glacial river-deposits the same numerical preponder- 

 ance of the reindeer is observed. Altogether it has been determined 

 in ten out of eighteen river-deposits which have furnished fossil 

 mammals, while the red-deer has been found only in nine. During 

 the arctic severity of the post-glacial climate the remains of the 

 red-deer were rare, while those of the reindeer were most abundant. 



During the pre-historic period the red-deer gradually increased 

 in numbers until the reindeer at last became extinct. In its rarity 

 in the latter epoch we have a proof of the great climatal change 

 that had taken place in France and Britain. 



Professor Owen figures in his 'British Fossil Mammals' (fig. 197) 

 a skull with antlers found in a peat-moss on Bilney Moor, 

 near East Dereham in Norfolk. He also gives a figure of a meta- 

 tarsal bone from the fens of Cambridgeshire. A third case was 

 afforded during the excavation at Crossness Point, on the south 

 side of the Thames, near Erith, which was made for the reservoir 

 of the southern outfall of the Metropolitan sewage. A fine antler 

 was obtained from the bottom of a layer of peat varying from five 

 to fifteen feet in thickness, along with the remains of a beaver and 

 a human skull. Another antler was found in a shell-marl under- 

 lying the peat near Whittington Hall, Lancashire. 



As regards its occurrence in Scotland we may learn almost all 

 there is to be said on the subject from an important memoir by 

 Dr. John Alexander Smith, published in the ' Proceedings of the 

 Society of Antiquaries of Scotland,' which deserves to be read in 

 its entirety.*' 



In Ireland Dr. Carte has noticed three antlers found at Coonagh, 

 on the south side of the Shannon, county Clare. A large number 

 of remains representing at least thirty fine individuals were found in 

 Shanday Lane, near Dungarvan, associated with the bones of other 



* ' Proc. Soc. Antiq. Scotl.,' vol. viii, pp. 186-223. 



