462 CERVUS. 



the Megaceros, just as the 'halb-wolf of the same ' Lied,' 

 has been conjectured to be the Hyaena. 



The total silence of Caesar and Tacitus respecting such 

 remarkable animals, renders their existence and subsequent 

 extirpation by the savage natives a matter of the highest 

 improbability ; and it has been well observed by Dr. Buck- 

 land that " the authority of the same romance would 

 equally establish the actual existence of giants, dwarfs, and 

 pigmies, of magic tarncaps the using of which would 

 make the wearer become invisible and of fire-dragons, 

 whose blood rendered the skin of him who bathed in it of 

 a horny consistence, which no sword or other weapon could 

 penetrate." 



Some appearances in the bones themselves of the Me- 

 gaceros, and, perhaps, an undue confidence in the vague 

 statements of their discovery, with remains of the existing 

 deer, hog, and sheep, in peat bogs, have led to the opinion 

 that the Gigantic Deer existed within the time of man. 

 Dr. Hart cites the fact of the discovery of a human body 

 in gravel, under eleven feet of peat, soaked in the bog- water, 

 which was in good preservation, and completely clothed in 

 antique garments of hair, which, it had been conjectured, 

 ' might be that of our fossil animal.'' But if any Megaceros 

 had perished, and left its body under the like circumstances, 

 its hide and hair ought equally to have been preserved. 

 Except, however, the solitary instance of fat or adipocere 

 in the shaft of one of the bones discovered by Archdeacon 

 Maunsell, not a particle of the soft parts of the animal 

 seems ever to have been found. Dr. Hart conceives that 

 " more conclusive evidence on this question is derived from 

 the appearance exhibited by a rib, in which he discovered 

 an oval opening near its lower edge, with the margin de- 

 pressed on the outer, and raised on the inner surface, round 



