Quadrupeds. 1685 



employed by a continental government, and managed to coax a head and horns out of 



an d another out of , on condition of conferring titles on 



the donors. He made a similar overture to Mr. Thomas Warren, of Blessington, but 

 this gentleman was not to be taken in with gilt gingerbread, and remains plain Esquire 

 to this day. Again, a man of the name of Crampton, a mineral dealer, took away two 

 cart-loads of these bones to the Isle of Man, Scotland, and England, and sold or ex- 

 changed them as he best could. — Richard Glennon ; Dublin. 



Further particulars of the Giant Deer of Ireland. — I have obtained a quantity of in- 

 formation relative to the remains of the animal in question, and am promised still 

 more from various quarters. Hitherto, everything appears calculated to bear out my 

 views, in the strongest manner, and indeed, I cannot see anything that could now 

 shake the evidence I have collected. In a letter I have received from Mr. Benn, of 

 Ballymena, occur the following passages : — " In the collection of the late Mr. Johnston, 

 of Down, which had been left by his uncle, an attorney, and in which everything was 

 labelled with the accuracy and precision of that profession, is a small brass spear, with 

 a piece of wood still in the socket, with a label, stating it to have been found in a marl 

 pit, among the bones of a deer." " An excise-officer told me that he saw, found in a 

 marl-pit, at a place called Mentrim in Meath, bordering on Louth, the skeleton of a 

 deer and man, and a long knife, — what he called a long knife, is, I believe, a short 

 iron sword, now, I think, in the collection of Mr. Petrie, of Dublin, who told me that 

 some such tradition had accompanied it into his possession." " I now come to state my 

 impressions as to the causes of these facts ; and the theory I have formed on the sub- 

 ject is, — that the animal lived in recent times, — that he was hunted and exterminated 

 for food, — that the mode of hunting him was to chase and terrify him into pools and 

 swamps, such as the marl-pits then were, — that the head was then cut off, as of little 

 value, and very difficult to drag out, — that the under jaw and tongue were cut off, 

 sometimes they were obliged to leave part of the neck, and sometimes a leg." In 

 Doctor Mantell's 'Wonders of Geology,' p. 110, it is stated, while treating of the 

 Great Deer, that Professor Jameson, Mr. Weaver, and others, have clearly proved that 

 this majestic creature was coeval with man, — that a skull was found in Germany, as- 

 sociated with stone hatchets and urns, — that in the county of Cork, a human body was 

 exhumed from a wet and marshy soil, beueath a bed of peat, eleven feet thick; the 

 body was in good preservation, and enveloped in a deer-skin covered with hair, — that 

 in Jameson's Cuvier, that eminent zoologist states a rib to have been found, injured 

 in such a manner as would lead to the supposition of the wound having been inflicted 

 by an arrow : and Dr. Mantell concludes, — " There is therefore presumptive evidence 

 that the race was extirpated by the hunter tribes who first took possession of these 

 islands." Dr. Mantell refers also to confirmatory opinions expressed by Mr. Charles 

 Lyell, President of the Geological Society of London, in an address, delivered by him 

 in 1837 : as also collateral evidence adduced by Dr. Scouler of Dublin, as resulting 

 from certain geological features of the places where the remains have been found. 

 Dr. Martin informs me that on the banks of the river Suir, near Portland, in the 

 county of Waterford, and on nearly every farm, are found, near springs, spaces of fre- 

 quently seventy feet in diameter, consisting of stones, broken up as for roads, and lying 

 together in a mass. These stones were evidently purposely broken, and all much of the 

 one size, and are charred. These spaces are many feet in depth. The tradition 

 respecting them, current among the peasantry, is, that here in olden time, a great deer 

 was killed and baked in these stone-pits, the stones having been previously heated like 

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