if 
‘OR, GREAT IRISH DEER. 219 
such circumstances to be, not that the megaceros had been hunted and 
killed by the crannoge builders, but that they had found the gigantic 
deer’s head, “and put it up for an ornament or trophy, as is done 
at the present day.”* 
So far, at least, it thus appears,—notwithstanding the indisputable 
proofs of the employment of the bones and horns of the Cervus 
megaceros by primitive manufacturers of the Neolithic age ; and the 
survival of this gigantic deer throughout the Paleolithic age of human 
art :—that evidence is still wanting to satisfy the scientific en- 
quirer as to the co-existence of man and the great fossil deer in Ire- 
land, where, more than in any other locality, this might be expected 
to occur. The primitive lyre found in the moat of Desmond Castle 
was undoubtedly fashioned from the bones of the extinct deer; but 
the material may have been recovered, as in modern times, from the 
marle of some neighbouring bog, and turned to account like the bog oak 
.so abundantly used in modern art ; rather than have been wrought 
by the Neolithic craftsman from the spoils of the chase. 
In 1859, Sir W. R. Wilde read a lengthened communication at 
two successive meetings of the Royal Irish Academy, “ Upon the 
unmanufactured animal remains belonging to the Academy.” In 
arranging its collection of Irish Antiquities his attention was drawn 
to numerous crania and bones, chiefly of carnivora and ruminants, 
from river beds, bogs and crannoges ; including sixteen crania, and 
upwards of seventy detached fragments of skeletons of the Cervus 
megaceros. The circumstances under which they were recovered 
have not been in all cases preserved, and no distinct evidence tends 
to confirm the idea of their contemporaneity with man. In remark- 
ing on the then novel recognition of the remains of Irish fossil deer 
in the tool-bearing gravel drifts of Abbeville, Sir W. R. Wilde 
observes: “As yet we have not discovered’any Irish name for it. 
If the animal was here a contemporary of man, it certainly had 
become extinct long before the Irish had a knowledge of letters.” + 
It is, however, altogether consistent with the evidence of a succession 
of races in the British Isles, and throughout Europe, to find that 
this era of the long extinct fossil mammalia pertaining to the Palzeo- 
lithic, or even to the Neolithic age of primitive art, has no record in 
the oldest of the living languages. The same is true of others of 
* Dublin Quarterly Journal of Science, iv., 125. + Proceedings of R. L. A. vii , 195. 
