444 
fixed in a heavy handle so as to increase the weight of the 
blow, and so placed as to resemble an adze rather than axe;” 
the fracture in the skull being just that which we see in 
those of oxen slaughtered with a pole-axe at the present day. 
The discovery of the skull with the celt in situ is a most 
remarkable corroboration of the origin of similar fractures in 
skulls of the megaceros, ox, and swine, which were found 
several years since in Lough Gur, near Limerick,* and 
created no little diversity of opinion at the period. Had a 
solitary specimen only occurred, it might have afforded a 
plausible reason for conjecture as to its being merely the 
result of accident. But when several examples were dis- 
covered, with precisely the same fracture in the frontal bone, 
it appeared to me that but one cause ought to have been 
assigned, and the one most natural to suggest itself was that 
the animals had been slaughtered or received their death- 
blow from the hands of man. 
This specimen, therefore, not only illustrates one use of the 
stone implements of that character most conclusively, but 
also a still more important fact, hitherto considered very 
doubtful by some of the most eminent geologists of the day. 
It proves that man has most certainly been coeval with this 
gigantic ruminant, which was itself a contemporary of the 
mammoth, rhinoceros, and other extinct mammalia of the 
post pliocene period; and therefore, in all probability, man 
has also coexisted with the extinct pachydermata, which 
consequently carries the advent of the human family back to 
an almost incalculably remote antiquity, and, to use the 
words of a modern writer— “ The conclusion of such dis- 
coveries is that ages ago, in the period of the extinct mam- 
* Skulls of the ox and swine, with the fractured frontal hone, from the above 
locality, have been many years in the Museum of the Leeds Philosophical and 
Literary Society ; as also the skull of an ox with a similar fracture, found with 
other hones in a Homan well near Gilsland. 
