210 AN ANCIENT HAUNT OF THE CERVUS MEGACEROS ; 
its limited endurance as a species it contrasts with the reindeer, 
along side of the fossil remains of which its horns and bones repeatedly 
occur; and its circumscribed area gives a peculiar interest to 
any indications of its co-existence ‘with man. The evidence furnished 
by the abundance of its remains in certain localities tends to suggest 
the idea that, at a time when the British Islands were only the more 
elevated portiops of the extended continent of Europe,—which then 
included in one continuous tract the English Channel, the German 
Ocean, and the Irish Sea, with a prolongation westward, embracing 
the Atlantic plateau now submerged to the extent of about one 
hundred fathoms :—-the favourite haunts of the Cervus megaceros 
were in plains and fertile valleys which, throughout the historic 
period have been mostly buried under the sea. 
In the ingenious speculations of the late Professor Edward Forbes 
on the migrations of plants and animals to their later insular habitats, 
he assumed a land passage to Ireland, consisting of the upraised 
marine drift which had been deposited on the bottom of the glacial 
sea. Over this he specially noted the presence of numerous remains 
of the fossil elk in the fresh water marl of his own native Isle of Man. 
In Scotland, on thecontrary, where the reindeer existed apparently from 
the time when it was the contemporary of the mammoth, to a period, 
historically speaking, recent, authenticated examples of the Cervus 
megaceros are extremely rare; whereas its designation alike as the 
megaceros Hibernicus, and Irish elk, is based on the occurrence of 
its skeletons more frequently in Ireland than elsewhere. It has 
indeed been assumed that there now lie submerged beneath the Irish 
Sea, the once fertile plains which, towards the close of its existence, 
constituted the favourite haunt of this magnificent fossil deer. 
It is not until the newer pliocene period is reached that the palzeon- 
tologist encounters the amply developed horns of the gigantic bisons 
and uri; and that a corresponding size characterises for the first 
time the antlers of the Cervus Sedgwickit, the Cervus dicranios, and of 
the Cerviis megaceros, pre-eminently noticeable for the enormous di- 
mensions of its spreading antlers. Along with the remains of the 
latter, or in corresponding postpliocene deposits, those of the rein- 
deer, which still survives both in Northern Europe and in America, 
are also found, at times in considerable abundance. 
At the meeting of the British Association, at Dublin, in 1878, 
an intelligent local naturalist, Mr. Richard J. Moss, of the Royal 
