[207] 
AN ANCIENT HAUNT OF 
THE CERVUS MEGACEROS: 
OR, GREAT IRISH DEER. 
BY DANIEL WILSON, LLD., F-.R.S.E: 
President of University College, Toronto. 
(READ BEFORE THE CaNADIAN INSTITUTE, 11TH JANUARY, 1879.) 
The following notes of a tourist’s observations in a brief visit 
to a locality of great interest alike to the paleontologist and the 
archeologist, were originally prepared with no further object in view 
than the contribution of a paper to be read at one of the evening 
meetings of the Canadian Institute, in the winter following the 
Irish explorations to which they refer. 
The reconstruction of the geography of the Paleolithic Age, and 
the re-animating its haunts with the extinct mammalia known to 
us uow only by their fossil remains, furnish materials for a romance 
of science more fascinating to the thoughtful student than all the 
fanciful creations of fiction. The geologist speaks of that time as 
recent when the temperature of southern France was such as to 
admit of the reindeer and the musk-ox, or sheep, haunting the low 
grounds along the skirts of the Pyrenees. But the term recent is 
used notin a historical, but a geological sense ; and is employed in 
the full recognition of the evidence of enormous revolutions, by 
which changes have been wrought, the results of which are now seen 
in the climate, the physical geography, the fauna and flora of modern 
Europe. Nor have these revolutions been limited to the Eastern 
Hemisphere ; though some of the climatic phenomena of the North 
American continent still perpetuate characteristics that help us in 
the interpretation of the strange disclosure of Europe’s pleistocene 
era. Within the preceding geological age the whole northern 
hemisphere experienced an enormous climatic change, which attained 
its maximum in the glacial period. Far to the south of the British 
