[207] 



AN ANCIENT HAUNT OF 



THE CEBYUS MEGACEEOS 



OR, GREAT IRISH DEER. 



BY DANIEL WILSON, LL. D., F.R.S. E. 



President of University College, Toronto. 



(Read before the Canadian Institute, 11th January, 1879.) 



The following notes of a .tourist's observations in a brief visit 

 to a locality of great interest alike to the palaeontologist and the 

 archaeologist, were originally prepared with no further object in view 

 than the contribution of a paper to be read at one of the evening 

 meetings of the Canadian Institute, in the winter following the 

 Irish explorations to which they refer. 



The reconstruction of the geography of the Palaeolithic Age, and 

 the re-animating its haunts with the extinct mammalia known to 

 us now only by their fossil remains, furnish materials for a romance 

 of science more fascinating to the thoughtful student than all the 

 fanciful creations of fiction. The geologist speaks of that time as 

 recent when the temperature of southern France was such as to 

 admit of the reindeer and the musk-ox, or sheep, haunting the low 

 grounds along the skirts of the Pyrenees. But the term recent is 

 used not in a historical, but a geological sense ; and is employed in 

 the full recognition of the evidence of enormous revolutions, by 

 which changes have been wrought, the results of which are now seen 

 in the climate, the physical geography, the fauna and flora of modern 

 Europe. Nor have these revolutions been limited to the Eastern 

 Hemisphere ; though some of the climatic phenomena of the North 

 American continent still perpetuate characteristics that help us in 

 the interpretation' of the strange disclosure of Europe's pleistocene 

 era. "Within the preceding geological age the whole noi'thern 

 hemisphere experienced an enormous climatic change, which attained 

 its maximum in the glacial period. Far to the south of the British 



