234 . Miscellaneous. 
MISCELLANEOUS. 
Notice of Powerful Bears, probably coeval with the Great Fossil 
Deer of Ireland. 
[From Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, Dec. 10, 1849.] 
Mr. Batt, on the part of Abraham Whyte Baker, sen., Esq., of 
Ballaghtobin, a member of the Academy, and one who has always 
endeavoured to promote its objects, presented accurate casts of two 
bear skulls found in the county of Westmeath. The following is a 
summary of the information Mr. Ball has been able to obtain relative~ 
to these very interesting relics of a powerful species long extinct in 
this island. Mr. Underwood, the well-known and industrious col- 
lector of antiquities, who has rescued from destruction many of the 
best specimens of human art now in the Academy’s museum, being 
in 1846 on one of his tours through the country, discovered at the 
house of Mr. Edward Fermon, of Forgney, County Longford, on the 
borders of Westmeath, between Moyvore and Ballymahon, the skull 
of an animal to him unknown. This he lost no time in securing, and 
in the following year obtained a second specimen, found in the same 
place, in a cut-away bog, about seven feet from the original surface. 
These skulls were purchased by Mr. Baker, and are the originals of 
which casts are by his desire presented to the Academy, being du- 
plicates of others given by him to the University Museum, where are 
now to be found, through the generosity of the Earl of Enniskillen, 
the East India Company, and our Zoological Society, a very instruct- 
ive collection of the remains of bears, both fossil and recent. 
On the discovery by Mr. Underwood of the larger skull, it was 
somewhat hastily announced as that of a great Irish wolf-dog, and 
was published in the newspapers as such. Under this impression it 
was brought to Mr. Ball, who, without hesitation, pronounced it to 
be that of a bear, which, on a little further investigation, he consi- 
dered to be the black bear of Europe. Soon after, Mr. Baker, with 
laudable liberality, purchased both specimens, and has thus preserved 
evidence of the existence of bears in Ireland, of which we had before 
no tangible proof or historical evidence. Dr. Scouler, in a paper on 
extinct animals of Ireland, published in the first volume of the Geo- 
logical Transactions, observes, that while bears still maintained their 
ground in England, they were unknown in Ireland. The Venerable 
Bede states, the only ravenous animals of Ireland were the wolf and 
fox. Giraldus makes no mention of the bear; and St. Donatus, who 
died in 840, states it was not a native, “‘ursorum rabies nulla est 
ibi,”’ &e. 
The late Mr. Richardson, through whose kind interference Mr. 
Ball obtained leave to make moulds of the skulls, appears to have 
been in much doubt as to their nature. He states (in his History of 
Dogs, p. 36) his opinion, that ‘“ they are the remains of an extinct 
animal allied to, but by no means identical with, the dog; and an 
animal with which we are now unacquainted, partaking somewhat of 
the characteristics of the bears, and perhaps, also, of the hyzenas.”’ 
