On the Recent and Extinct Irish Mammals. 67 
near Dunshaughlin, county Meath. The same are figured and 
referred to by Sir William Wilde, and enumerated in the Cata- 
logue of Antiquities of the Royal Irish Academy.* These crania (6) 
are now in the Museum of Science and Art, but the largest recorded 
by Wilde is not in the collection. Four of the specimens evidently 
belonged to the same breed, whilst the fifth, stained black as if 
from bog deposit or charcoal, represents a shorter-muzzled hound, 
and possibly of a mixed breed. I have compared the fore- 
going with crania of wolves and deer hounds, and also with a 
very large skull in the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons 
of England, of a thoroughbred German boar hound, three years 
old, whose height was 324 inches at the shoulder. 
As regards dimensions, the largest Irish skull (Plate V.) ex- 
ceeds that of the German hound as follows:— 
Trish, German, 
Inches. Inches. 
Length of Skull, . . . . 10 9 
Breadth of Forehead, . ‘ ° 3.3 3 
Length of Snout, 7 . - . 4.5 4.3 
Breadth of Palate at the first true molar, : 2.8 2.6 
The sagittal and lambdoidal ridges are far more prominent in 
the Irish than in the German skull, showing thereby more ex- 
‘tensive muscular attachments. The snout is somewhat broader 
in the German cranium, and the molars are larger and more wolf- 
hike in the Irish, whose canines are robust and very like the 
same teeth in the wolf. Indeed the Irish skulls are scarcely to 
be differentiated osteologically from those of the wolf: the vari- 
ability, however, in size between the adult specimens, is greater 
than would ordinarily appear in the latter, and the muzzles are 
considerably stouter. Judging, therefore, from the larger speci- 
men referred to by Wilde—who gives the length of the cranium 
as 11 inches,f which is one inch more than the above, it will appear 
that these two crania must have belonged to truly noble hounds, 
of a breed similar to the Scotch hound, although much larger than 
the ordinary individuals met with now-a-days. ‘Two of the 
crania show fractures of the brain case, and, in addition, one dis- 
plays, on the muzzle, a partially healed up incisive wound by 
some sharp instrument. 
* Proc. Roy. Irish Ac., Vol. I. and Vol. VII., and Catalogue page 222. 
t Proc. Roy. Irish Ac., vol. VII., page 194. 
Scien. Proc. R.D.S., Vou. 11, Pv. 1. F2 
