454 CERVUS. 
the relative size of the antlers to the body comes nearest to 
the peculiar proportions of those appendages in the Mega- 
ceros. 
The brow-antler, and the expansion of the beam into a 
palm, brings the Aegaceros, as Colonel Hamilton Smith 
first showed, into that group of the Cervine family to 
which the Fallow-deer belongs,—this species being, perhaps, 
the nearest existing representative of the gigantic extinct 
species ; but in the Fallow-deer, (fig. 191) all the branches” 
above the bezantler (4z) are sent off from the posterior mar- 
gin and end of the palm, while in the Megaceros they are all, 
with one exception, sent off from the anterior and terminal 
margin. The brow-antler (67) in the Fallow-deer is always 
simple, cylindrical, and pointed; in the Megaceros it 1s 
often expanded and sometimes bifurcate at the end, but 
never so long or so ramified as in the Rein-deer. With 
justice, therefore, might Cuvier, who had pursued the com- 
parison of the antlers through all the known species of Deer, 
affirm that ‘“ the inspection of the head and antlers alone of 
the ‘ Cerf a bois gigantesques’ suffices to assure us that it 
is an extinct animal, like the long-headed Rhinoceros, the 
little Hippopotamus, the Elephant with long tusk-sockets, 
and the gigantic Tapir,* which, if they belong to known 
genera, are not the less unknown, as species, on the actual 
surface of the earth.” + 
In fact, the antlers of the great Irish Deer, combining 
some of the characters of those of the Elk, the Rein-deer, 
and the Fallow, with others peculiar to themselves, compel 
the zoologist, guided by the principles so admirably wrought 
out by Colonel Hamilton Smith { for the subgeneric ar- 
* Now known as the still more extraordinary Dinothere, of which not only the 
species but the genus has passed away. 
+ Op. cit. p. 82. 
$ Griffith’s Cuvier, 8vo. vol. iv. 1827. 
