1 6 EXTINCT BRITISH ANIMALS. 



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 Cambrensis, 

 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 extinct in the island before man 

 commenced to make records of the /era of the country; 

 for it is a remarkable circumstance that in all the 

 remains of Irish extinct mammals, none present 

 the fragmentary characters afforded by the cavern 

 deposits of the sister island ; thus showing on the one 

 hand, that they had not been destroyed by man, nor 

 by the bone- crunching hyaena, but that they met 

 their deaths, for the most part, through natural 

 causes and accidents." 



The Welsh Triads, some of which are supposed to 

 have been compiled in the ninth century, but most 

 of which are of a much later date,f say that " the 

 Kymry, a Celtic tribe, first inhabited Britain ; before 

 them were no men there, but only bears, wolves, 

 beavers, and oxen with high prominences." 



* In Ireland, according to St. Donatus, who died in 840, the Bear 

 was not indigenous : " ursorwm rabies nulla est ibi." 



f See Stephens, " Literature of the Kymry," p. 427 (ed. 1876) and 

 Appendix. 



