336 Batit—Fossil Mammalia of Ireland. 
county Fermanagh; with these exceptions, and possibly also some of the bones 
from other localities which have been doubtfully referred to dogs, no discoveries 
of wolves’ remains are recorded in Ireland. This is a most singular fact when we 
consider the historical facts. It serves to show how a large animal, at one time 
very abundant, may disappear, leaving but little trace behind it; for in each of 
these cases even the remains are few and fragmentary. 
The following facts as to the extinction of the wolf are of interest. ‘In 1652 
a council order of Cromwell’s government prohibited the export of wolf dogs, and 
offered rewards of £5 and £6 respectively for male and female wolves.” Smith, in 
his History of Kerry, p. 173, says the last was killed there in 1710. Mr. Hardiman, 
editor of O’Flaherty’s Description of H-Iar Connaught, pp. 10 and 180, gives some 
information on the subject, and says that, so far as he could ascertain, the date 
of the last wolf being seen in that district was 1700. 
3.—Tue Witp Horse. 
Equus caballus, ferus. 
There can be no doubt that the horse existed in Ireland during the pleistocene 
period as a contemporary of several animals which are now extinct. In the 
Shandon Cave at Dungarvan, on the authority of Dr. Leith Adams, the remains of 
six horses were found, together with those of mammoth, reindeer, red deer, 
bear, and wolf. So far as the evidence goes, these animals lived at a time anterior 
to the arrival of man in Ireland. In the Ballynamintra Cave horses’ teeth were 
found, together with the bones of bear, Irish elk, and wolf, which were 
associated with human remains, and those of many still existing animals. It is 
possible that these horses had been used for food by the men of this period. It 
may be added that the characters of the associated remains and the circumstances 
of their position afford the principal evidence as to whether the bones should be 
referred to wild or domesticated varieties of the horse. 
There are several more or less well-authenticated instances of horses’ skulls 
having been taken from the drift and deposits of similar age; others have been 
found in caves at Ballintoy, county Antrim, and near the shores of Loch Erne. 
It is not improbable that the wild horse may have survived up to about the 
time when the wolf became extinct, or at any rate till long after most of its above- 
mentioned earliest contemporaries had become extinct. 
This Museum only possesses a few fragmentary equine remains at present, but 
there are two skulls in the Geological Museum of Trinity College. 
