216 AN ANCIENT HAUNT OF THE CERVUS MEGACRROS ; 



age of prehistoric man in Central Europe, in Southern England, and 

 in the later post-pliocene areas of Northern Europe. Meanwhile it 

 •will suffice to note some of the discoveries which have already been 

 advanced in favour of the idea that the great fossil deer of Ireland 

 was not unknown to its earliest, inhabitants as one of its living 

 fauna. 



Professor Jamieson and Dr. Mantell long ago noted the discovery, 

 in the County of Cork, of a human body exhumed from a depth of 

 eleven feet of peat bog. It lay in the spongy soil beneath. The soft 

 parts were converted into adipocere, and the body, thus preserved, 

 was enveloped in a deer-skin of such lai'ge dimensions as to lead 

 them to the opinion that it belonged to the extinct Irish elk. 



At the meeting of the British Association, at Newcastle, in 1863, 

 Professor J. Beetes Jukes exhibited a right tibia, with a portion of one 

 of the antlers of a Cervus megaceros, recovered from a bog 

 near Logan, County Longford. They were found along with other 

 remains of the skeleton, embedded in shell-marl two or three feet 

 thick, resting on blue clay and gravel. A deep indentation on 

 the tibia, abovit two inches broad and a quarter of an inch deep, 

 was exactly fitted to receive the antler-tyne. " They looked," 

 says Professor Jukes, " as if they liad been each chipped out 

 with some sharp instrument," and he added, " The impression 

 left on my mind from a first inspection was that these indentations 

 were the best evidence tliat had yet turned up in proof of man 

 having been contemporaneous in Ireland with the Cervus megaceros, 

 and having left his mark upon the horns of a;n animal soon after its 

 death, which he had himself probably killed." * I was present in the 

 section at the Newcastle meeting, and examined with much interest 

 this supposed lethal weapon of the men of the era of the great Irish 

 deer, adduced on such credible authority as seemingly determining 

 the question of their coexistence in Ireland. But more careful 

 observations, added to the apparent fact that the indented bones 

 and antler had lain alongside of other portions of the skeleton 

 embedded in the marie, has since led to the conclusion that this sup- 

 posed primitive weapon was the chance product of natural processes 

 still in force. Such seemingly artificial indentations and abrasions are 

 now found to be by no means rare, as will be seen from spacimens 

 now produced, of similarly marked bones of the Cervus onegaceros 



* Dublin Quarterly Journal of Science, ix. 212. 



