482 CERVUS. 
indigenous in Scotland. ‘‘ Several hundreds,” he observes, 
‘have been procured within the last century, from five or 
six small lakes in Forfarshire, where shell-marl has been 
worked.” Those of the stag (Cervus elaphus) are the most 
numerous, and if the others be arranged in the order of 
their relative abundance, they will follow, according to Mr. 
Lyell, nearly thus: Ox, Boar, Dog, Hare, Fox, Wolf, and 
Cat; the Beaver is the rarest. A pair of Deer’s horns of 
large size, and with fine antlers, together with two meta- 
carpal bones, “‘ so deeply grooved as to appear like double: 
bones,” were dug up out of a marl-pit beneath five or six 
feet of peat-moss, on the margins of the Loch of Marlee. In 
the same place were found the remains of the Beaver noticed 
at p. 194. Mr. Neill, who has recorded both these disco- 
Fig. 199. veries, says, with regard to the deeply-grooved 
leg-bones, “It has been suggested to me by Dr. 
Barclay, that they were probably the metatarsal 
bones of the great species of Deer, which ap- 
pears to have been contemporary with the 
Beaver, and to have become extinct much about 
the same period with that animal.”* If the 
Megaceros Hibernicus be the species here referred 
to, the character of the deep-grooved meta- 
carpal bone will not at all apply to it, since 
the median longitudinal groove is wider and 
shallower on both the fore and back part of the 
metacarpals and metatarsals in the A/egaceros 
than in any other species of Deer; the Rein- 
deer is most remarkable for the depth of the 
grooves, especially the posterior one of the meta- 
Metatarsal of 
Rein-deer, 4 
nat.size. Fens. the absence of the specimens, and of any know- 
tarsus. I will not venture to pronounce, in 
* ¢ Jamieson’s Edinburgh Philosophical Journal,’ vol. i. 1819, p. 183. 
