OR, GREAT IRISH DEER. 209 



In the variations of temperature which marked, the retrocession of 

 the expiring glacial influences in central Europe, throughout the 

 region extending between the Alps and the mountain ranges of Scot- 

 land and Wales, the winter resembled that which even now prevails 

 on the North American continent, in latitudes in which the moose, 

 the wapiti, and the grizzly bear, freely range over the same areas 

 where during a brief summer of intense heat enormous herds of 

 buffalo annually migrate from the south. A similar alternation of 

 seasons within the European glacial period can alone account for the 

 presence, alongside of an arctic fauna, of animals such as the hippo- 

 potamus and the hyaena, known only throughout the historical 

 period as natives of the ti-opics. The range of temperature of Cana- 

 dian seasons admits of the Arctic skua-gull, the snow-goose, the 

 Lapland bunting, and the like northern visitors, meeting the king-bird, 

 the humming-bird, and other wanderers from the gulf of Mexico. 



Such conditions of climate may account for the recovery of the 

 I'emains of the reindeer and the hippopotamus in the same drift and 

 cave-deposits of Eui-ope's glacial period. The woolly mammoth and 

 rhinoceros, the musk-sheep, reindeer, and other arctic fauna, may be 

 presumed to have annually retreated from the summer heats, and 

 given place to those animals, thfi living representatives of which are 

 now fo\ind only in tropical Africa. No class of evidence is better 

 calculated to throw light on some of the obscure questions relative to 

 primeval man, than that which exhibits him associated with the 

 long displaced or extinct mammals of that transitional period. Man, 

 it is no longer doubted, was contemporaneous with the mammoth 

 before its disappearance from southern France ; and occupied the 

 cave-dwellings in the upper valleys of the Garonne, while the reindeer 

 still abounded there. In fact, the palseolithic hunter of central 

 Europe, and the extinct carnivora of its caves, alike preyed upon 

 the numerous herbivora that then roamed over fertile plains and 

 valleys reaching uninterruptedly, northward and westward, beyond 

 the English Channel and the Irish Sea ; just as the Buffalo — now 

 hastening to extinction, — still ranges over the vast prairies of the 

 North American continent. 



Among the fauna of this transitional period in Europe's pre- 

 historic era, one animal, the magnificent deer, known as the Gervus 

 megaceros, the Megaceros Hlhernicus, or Great Irish Elk, occupies 

 in some respects a unique position, and sj)ecially invites study. In 



