OR, GREAT IRISH DEER. 209 
In the variations of temperature which marked the retrocession of 
the expiring glacial influences in central Europe, throughout the 
region extending between the Alps and the mountain ranges of Scot- 
land and Wales, the winter resembled that which even now prevails 
on the North American continent, in latitudes in which the moose, 
the wapiti, and the grizzly bear, freely range over the same areas 
wherg during a brief summer of intense heat enormous herds of 
buffalo annually migrate from the south. A similar alternation of 
seasons within the European glacial period can alone account for the 
presence, alongside of an arctic fauna, of animals such as the hippo- 
potamus and the hyena, known only throughout the historical 
period as natives of the tropics. The range of temperature of Cana- 
dian seasons admits of the Arctic skua-gull, the snow-goose, the 
Lapland bunting, and the like northern visitors, meeting the king-bird, 
the humming-bird, and other wanderers from the gulf of Mexico. 
Such conditions of climate may account for the recovery of the 
remains of the reindeer and the hippopotamus in the same drift and 
cave-deposits of Europe’s glacial period. The woolly mammoth and 
rhinoceros, the musk-sheep, reindeer, and other arctic fauna, may be 
presumed to have annually retreated from the summer heats, and 
given place to those animals, the living representatives of which are 
now found only in tropical Africa. No class of evidence is better 
calculated to throw light on some of the obscure questions relative to 
primeval man, than that which exhibits him associated with the 
long displaced or extinct mammals of that transitional period. Man, 
it is no longer doubted, was contemporaneous with the mammoth 
before its disappearance from southern France ; and occupied the 
cave-dwellings in the upper valleys of the Garonne, while the reindeer 
still abounded there. In fact, the paleolithic hunter of central 
Europe, and the extinct carnivora of its caves, alike preyed upon 
the numerous herbivora that then roamed over fertile plains and 
valleys reaching uninterruptedly, northward and westward, beyond 
the English Channel and the Irish Sea; just as the Buffalo—now 
hastening to extinction,—still ranges Ger the vast prairies of the 
North American continent. 
Among the fauna of this transitional period in Europe’s pre- 
historic era, one animal, the magnificent deer, known as the Cervus 
megaceros, the Megaceros Hibernicus, or Great Irish Elk, occupies 
in some respects a unique position, and specially invites study. In 
