16 EXTINCT BRITISH ANIMALS. 
deer, Fox, and Variable or Alpine Hare; and 
although not found along with the Irish Elk, it has 
been generally met with in similar lacustrine beds. 
It seems to me that, as in the neighbouring island, if 
the Brown Bear had ever been a native of Ireland, it 
would, as in Scotland and England, have come down 
to the historical period ; so that the fact of no notice 
of its presence, and the very emphatic assertions or 
silence of Bede, St. Donatus,* Giraldus Cambrensis, 
and Pennant, seem to me to bear out the results of 
recent disclosures. The probability is, therefore, 
that, like its congeners, all, excepting the Hare and 
Red-deer, became extinct in the island before man 
commenced to make records of the fer of the country; 
for it is a remarkable circumstance that in all the 
remains of Irish extinct mammals, none present 
the fragmentary characters afforded by the cavern 
deposits of the sister island ; thus showing on the one 
hand, that they had not been destroyed by man, nor 
by the bone-crunching hyzena, but that they met 
their deaths, for the most part, through natural 
causes and accidents.” 
The Welsh Triads, some of which are supposed to 
have been compiled in the ninth century, but most 
of which are of a much later date, say that “the 
Kymry, a Celtic tribe, first inhabited Britain ; before 
them were no men there, but only bears, wolves, 
beavers, and oxen with high prominences.” 
* In Ireland, according to St. Donatus, who died in 840, the Bear 
was not indigenous: “ wrsorum rabies nulla est ibi.” 
+ See Stephens, “ Literature of the Kymry,” p. 427 (ed. 1876), and 
Appendix. 
