462 CERVUS. 
the Megaceros, just as the ‘halb-wolf’ of the same ‘ Lied,’ 
has been conjectured to be the Hyena. 
The total silence of Cesar and Tacitus respecting such 
remarkable animals, renders their existence and subsequent 
extirpation by the savage natives a matter of the highest 
improbability ; and it has been well observed by Dr. Buck- 
land that “the authority of the same romance would 
equally establish the actual existence of giants, dwarfs, and 
pigmies, of magic tarncaps—the using of which would 
make the wearer become invisible—and of fire-dragons, 
whose blood rendered the skin of him who bathed in it of 
a horny consistence, which no sword or other weapon could 
penetrate.” 
Some appearances in the bones themselves of the Me- 
gaceros, and, perhaps, an undue confidence in the vague 
statements of their discovery, with remains of the existing 
deer, hog, and sheep, in peat bogs, have led to the opimion 
that the Gigantic Deer existed within the time of man. 
Dr. Hart cites the fact of the discovery of a human body 
in gravel, under eleven feet of peat, soaked in the bog-water, 
which was in good preservation, and completely clothed in 
antique garments of hair, which, it had been conjectured, 
‘might be that of our fossil animal.’ But if any Megaceros 
had perished, and left its body under the like circumstances, 
its hide and hair ought equally to have been preserved. 
Iixcept, however, the solitary instance of fat or adipocere 
in the shaft of one of the bones discovered by Archdeacon 
Maunsell, not a particle of the soft parts of the animal 
seems ever to have been found. Dr. Hart conceives that 
‘““more conclusive evidence on this question is derived from 
the appearance exhibited by a rib, in which he discovered 
an oval opening near its lower edge, with the margin de- 
pressed on the outer, and raised on the inner surface, round 
