52 FOREST LIFE IN ACADIE. 



assignable to red or reindeer, a bison, and an elk. **If," 

 says the author, "as. Mr. Dawkins considers, these teeth 

 are referable to those now exclusively northern quadrupeds, 

 we have evidence of the reindeer and elk having been 

 the food of man in the Lebanon not long before the 

 historic period ; for there is no necessity to put back to 

 any date of immeasurable antiquity the deposition of 

 these remains in a limestone cavern. And,'' he adds, 

 with significant reference to the great extension of the 

 ancient zoological province of which we are speaking, 

 ** there is nothing more extraordinary in this occurrence 

 than in the discovery of the bones of the tailless hare of 

 Siberia in the breccias of Sardinia and Corsica." 



The first allusion to the elk in the pages of history is 

 made by Caesar in the sixth book " De Bello Gallico'' — 

 ''sunt item qiice appellantur Alces" etc. etc., a descrip- 

 ,tion of an animal inhabiting the great Hercynian forest 

 of ancient Germany, in common with some other remark- 

 able ferae, also mentioned, which can refer to no other, 

 the name being evidently Latinised from the old Teutonic 

 cognomen of elg, elch, or aelg, whence also our own term 

 elk. He speaks of the forest as commencing near the 

 territories of the Helvetii, and extending eastward along 

 the Danube to the country inhabited by the Dacians. 

 " Under this general name," says Dr. Smith, " Caesar 

 appears to have included all the mountains and forests 

 in the south and centre of Germany, the Black Forest, 

 Odenwald, Thtiringenwald, the Hartz, the Erzgebirge, the 

 Eiesengebirge, etc., etc. As the Komans became better 

 acquainted with Germany, the name was confined to 

 narrower limits. Pliny and Tacitus use it to indicate 

 the range of mountains between the Thtiringenwald and 



