ANCIENT AND EXTINCT BRITISH QUADRUPEDS. 135 
could have sojourned for ages in a country without leaving behind 
them traces of their former existence, not only in their cast antlers, 
but on account of the fact that they were much more numerous 
than the Carnivora which prey upon them. 
The Fatrow Derr, a native of Southern Europe, and still met 
with in several islands of the Mediterranean and elsewhere, has, 
on the discovery of a single horn in the mud of the Thames at 
Clacton, been supposed to have inhabited Great Britain in the 
days of the elephants, bears, and other animals of the post-glacial 
period.* 
THE REINDEER was one of the earliest arrivals on British soil 
after the ice and snow of the glacial epoch began to disappear. It 
must have been very common in England and Ireland, and perhaps 
also in Scotland—at all events, after the great glaciers began to 
recede. Remains of the animal have been discovered in thirty 
caverns and in as many river deposits throughout England, and in 
Irish caverns, and in shell marl under Irish bogs and Scottish 
lakes.t It is still plentifully distributed over the boreal regions 
of Europe, Asia, and America, but varies considerably in dimen- 
sions, and somewhat in the appearance of the antlers, in different 
countries ; indeed, as regards height and weight, there are remark- 
able peculiarities in different regions. Thus the Reindeer of 
Lapland is small, as compared with the Siberian and Newfoundland 
forms; the former stands about three feet five inches, whilst the 
latter is on an average four feet two inches at the withers, their 
weights respectively being often 90 tbs. and 300 Ibs. There is no 
evidence to show when the Reindeer disappeared from the British 
Isles, but it was contemporary with the Lion, Hyena, and 
Elephant, and lingered on until the advent of man, whose flint 
tools have been discovered in the same deposits which contain its 
bones. The fossil remains, as compared with the bones of recent 
varieties, such as the Caribou or Great Woodland Reindeer of 
of Canada and the smaller forms of Northern Europe, approach, 
in the rounded beam and large brow antler and dimensions of 
bones, to the Norwegian and Lapland Reindeers, which are pro- 
bably direct descendants of the old British stock; so that the 
* Vide supra p. 92. 
+ As many as 1000 antlers are said to have been taken from a rock fissure in 
South Wales. Falconer, Paleontological Memoirs, vol. ii., p. 510. 
