GREA T IRISH DEER—STELLERS SEA- CO W. 241 



hunted by man at the time when he hunted reindeer in this part 

 of Europe, but the age of the strata containing the remains is 

 doubtful. Again, there is a rib in the Dublin Museum with a 

 perforation which is sometimes taken to be the result of a wound 

 from a dart, arrow, or spear ; but the wound may have been 

 inflicted by one of the sharp tynes in a fight between two bucks. 



Dr. Hart mentions the discovery of a human body in gravel, 

 under eleven feet of peat, soaked in bog-water, in good preserva- 

 tion, and completely clothed in antique garments of hair, which 

 it has been conjectured might be that of the Great Deer. But if 

 some individual animal had perished and left its body under the 

 like circumstances, its hide and hair ought equally to have been 

 preserved. Dr. Molyneux, to whom we owe the first account of 

 its discovery, says that its extinction in Ireland has occurred " so 

 many ages past, as there remains among us not the least record 

 in writing, or any manner of tradition, that makes so much as 

 mention of its name ; as that most laborious inquirer into the 

 pretended ancient but certainly fabulous history of this country, 

 Mr. Roger O'Flaherty, the author of Oejgia, has lately informed 

 me." 1 



In the romance of the " Niebelungen," now immortalised by 

 Wagner, which was written in the thirteenth century, the word 

 s/iek^ occurs, and is applied to one of the beasts slain in a great 

 hunt a few hundred years before that time in Germany. This 

 w^ord has been cited by some naturalists as probably signifying 

 the Great Irish Deer. But this is mere conjecture, and the word 

 might apply to some big Red Deer. The total silence of Caesar 

 and Tacitus respecting such remarkable animals renders it highly 

 improbable that they were known to the ancient Britons. 



Two entire skeletons of the male, with antlers measuring a little 

 over nine feet from tip to tip, and one skeleton of the hornless 

 doe, are to be seen set up in the middle of the long gallery No. i 

 at the Natural History Museum. The drawing in Fig. 57 is from 



' Philosophical 7'ransactions, vol. xix. p. 490. 



R 



