216 AN ANCIENT HAUNT OF THE CERVUS MEGACEROS ; 
age of prehistoric man in Central Europe, in Southern England, and 
in the later post-pliocene areas of Northern Europe. Meanwhile it 
will suffice to note some of the discoveries which have already been 
advanced in favour of the idea that the great fossil deer of Ireland 
was not unknown to its earliest inhabitants as one of its living 
fauna. 
Professor Jamieson and Dr. Mantell long ago noted the discovery, 
in the County of Cork, of a human body exhumed from‘a depth of 
eleven feet of peat bog. It lay inthe spongy soil beneath. The soft 
parts were converted into adipocere, and the body, thus preserved, 
was enveloped in a deer-skin of such large dimensions as to lead 
them to the opinion that it belonged to the extinct Ivish elk. 
At the meeting of the British Association, at Newcastle, in 1863, 
Professor J. Beetes Jukes exhibited a right tibia, with a portion of one 
of the antlers of a Cervus megaceros, recovered from a bog 
near Logan, County Longford. They were found along with other 
remains of the skeleton, embedded in shell-marl two or three feet 
thick, resting on blue clay and gravel. A deep indentation on 
the tibia, about two inches broad and a quarter of an inch deep, 
was exactly fitted to receive the antler-tyne. “They looked,” 
says Professor Jukes, “as if they had been each chipped out 
with some sharp instrument,” and he added, ‘The impression 
"left on my mind from a first inspection was that these indentations 
were the best evidence that had yet turned up in proof of man 
having been contemporaneous in Ireland with the Cervus megaceros, 
and having left his mark upon the horns of an animal soon after its , 
death, which he had himself probably killed.” * I was present in the 
section at the Newcastle meeting, and examined with much interest 
this supposed lethal weapon of the men of the era of the great Irish 
deer, adduced on such credible authority as seemingly determining 
‘the question of their coexistence in Ireland. But more careful 
observations, added to the apparent fact that the indented. bones 
and antler had lain alongside of other portions of the skeleton 
embedded in the marle, has since led to the conclusion that this sup- 
posed primitive weapon was the chance product of natural processes 
stillin force. Such seemingly artificial indentations and abrasions are. 
now found to be by no means rare, as will be seen from specimens 
now produced, of similarly marked bones of the Cervus megaceros 
* Dublin Quarterly Journal of Scienze, iv. 212. 
