474 



CERVUS. 



in driving a drain to a lead-mine, about nine yards deep 

 from the surface of the earth, at Lathill Dale, near Bake- 

 well, Derbyshire. The antlers, with other bones, were in 

 " a sort of soft coarse clay, or marl, interspersed with little 

 petrified balls or pellets of the same kind of substance as 

 the tuft." * Mr. Barker subsequently narrates that " some 

 men working in a quarry of that kind of stone which in this 

 part of Derbyshire we call ' tuft,' at about five or six feet 

 below the surface in a very solid part of the rock, met with 

 several fragments of the horns and bones of one or different 

 animals." The antlers, when worked out of the surround- 

 ing matrix, proved to be those of a ' crowned Hart,' in 

 which the summit or sur-royal expands and radiates a 

 number of short snags from a funnel-shaped cavity, large 

 enough to contain a thrush's nest, whence the park-keepers, 

 Mr. Barker says, call them ' throstle-nest horns. 1 The 

 following were the dimensions of the fossil antler as com- 

 pared with the corresponding one of a recent Red-deer. 



Fossil. Recent. 



Ft. In. Ft. In. 



Circumference at the insertion into the skull . 9| 07 

 Length of lowest (brow) antler ... 1 2 10 



Length of entire horn ..... 3 3J 2 ?it 



The locality in Derbyshire where these remains were 

 found is Alport, in the parish of Youlgreave. 



Mr. Okes makes mention of the discovery, at about half 

 a mile eastward of the town of Chatteris, in Cambridge- 

 shire, in a stratum of clay, underlying peat-moss, " of part of 

 the horns of a species of Deer, measuring two feet, and, in 

 circumference at that end by which it is attached to the 

 skull, ten inches." This, Mr. Okes concludes " from its 



* Phil. Trans, vol. xliii. p. 266. Tuft is a deposit from calcareous waters on 

 their exposure to air, usually containing portions of plants incrusted with car- 

 bonate of lime ; it is called by modern geologists, when it is porous, ' tufa,' and 

 when solid ' travertin.' t Ib. vol. Ixxv. p. 353. 



