62 Scientific Proceedings, Royal Dublin Society. 
I am therefore induced to believe with Professor Boyd 
Dawkins* that the Loch Gur remains cannot be affirmed to 
belong to the Polar Bear. They represent, however, a very large 
bear—as large, probably, as the owner of the Leitrim skull— 
and closely allied, if not absolutely identical, with the same parts 
of Ursus fossilis and Ursus ferox, which species come nearest 
to it in size; although the Ursus arctos does not differ from it 
in the general characters, it does so in dimensions. 
A study of the osteological characters of these ursine remains 
whichrepresentall theauthenticated instances of discoveries hitherto 
recorded from Ireland, appears to me to furnish characters referable 
only to one species, which, on the score of dimensions and general 
features, is inseparable from the so-called Ursus fossilis of Goldfuss 
and at all events, from the smaller Spelean Bear, found in English 
and other deposits, as distinguished from the larger congener found 
also in England, but more plentifully on the Continent of Europe, 
Unless the skull from Kildare represents the Ursus.arctos (and 
that, I think, is doubtful), all the others seem to me to belong to 
the Ursus fossilis, which, as far as osteological and dental charac- 
ters are concerned, would appear to have been the progenitor of 
the recent Ursus ferox, now repelled to Western North America. 
In this latter view I am supported by the distinguished palzeon- 
tologist, Mr. Busk, F.R.s., whose differentiations, as regards several 
of the Irish crania, were made before I commenced to study them. 
It may be said, therefore, that the Ursus ferox, as in England, 
belonged to the pre-historic fauna, and was a native of the island 
in the days of the Reindeer, Mammoth, Horse, and Wolf, with 
which its remains have been found associated, as also with exuvia 
of the Red Deer, Fox, and Variable or Alpine Hare ; and although 
not found along with the Irish Elk, it has been generally met 
with in similar lacustrine beds. It seems to me that, as in the 
neighbouring Island, if the Brown Bear had ever been a native 
of Ireland, it would, as in Scotland and England, have come down 
to the historical period; so that the fact of no notice of its presence, 
and the very emphatic assertions or silence of Bede, St. Donatus’ 
Giraldus Cambriensis, and Pennant, seem to me to bear out the 
results of recent disclosures. The probability is, therefore, that 
like its congeners, all, excepting the Hare and Red Deer, became 
» “British Pleistocene Mammals.” Memoirs of the Palzontographical Society of 
Great Britain, 1864. 
