OR, GREAT IRISH DEER. 213 
grounds were extensively traversed by a net-work of lakes, and the 
surrounding country was covered with forest, and overrun by animals 
known to us now chiefly by the researches of the paleontologist. But 
also it is among the glimpses which that prolonged transitional period 
furnishes, that we catch, towards its prehistoric close, evidence not 
only of the presence of man, but of the introduction of the domesticated 
animals of Kurope. Among its fossil mammalia the true Cervide, 
to which the Irish elk belongs, appear to be, geologically speaking, 
ef recent origin. No remains of extinct genera of the deer family 
thus far discovered in either hemisphere have been found to extend 
farther back than the upper mioscene; and Mr. A. Russel Wallace 
recognises the whole family as an Old World group which passed first 
to North America, and subsequently to the Southern continent. The 
remains of many extinct species belonging to existing genera occur 
in the post-pliocene and recent deposits both of EKurope and America ; 
‘but no representative of the deer family has thus far been found in 
South Africa or Australia. 
Of the numerous ascertained fossil deer many forms are known 
only by fragmentary remains ; but few great collections of Natural 
History fail to possess a well preserved skeleton of the Irish elk. 
Strictly speaking the Cervus megaceros is not a true elk, like the 
living Moose (Alces palmatus). It takes its place intermediately 
between the Reindeer and the Fallow deer (Dama vulgaris), and has 
its living analogues in the European Red Deer (Cervus elaphus), and 
the Wapiti (Cervus Canadensis) of the American Continent. The 
abundance of its remains in some localities, as in the Ballybetagh 
Bog, their high state of preservation, and their position generally in 
bogs and lacustrine deposits, overlaid by bog oak and other remains 
of the latest forests ; and at times by actual evidences of human art : 
all tend to suggest the idea of this gigantic deer having co- 
existed with man. It was contemporaneous, not only with the 
mammoth, the woolly rhinoceros, and other extinct European mam- 
malia of a like unfamiliar type, but also with an important group of 
wild animals which not only survived into that transitional period 
in which the geologist and the archeologist meet on common ground ; 
but some of which have still their living representatives. Of the 
former the gigantic Urus (Bos primigenius) is the most notable, 
with its recognized relationship to the larger domesticated cattle of 
modern Europe. Of the latter the most interesting is the Reindeer. 
