THE RED DEER 
are comparatively short and very thick. Irish Red deer heads recovered 
from the peat hags, where they are very plentiful, are of the finest shape, 
with especially well -developed tops. Yet one Scottish specimen, that 
from Ashkirk, now in the Edinburgh Museum, is quite an ideal head of 
the Irish type. 
The most remarkable head discovered in Great Britain was found in 
a quarry at Bakewell, in Derbyshire, in January, 1785. These horns, 
which are of extraordinary size and thickness, lay for some time neglected 
in the ossiferous caverns beneath the British Museum until I pieced them 
together and realized how unusually fine they were. On my calling 
Dr Henry Woodward’s attention to them he had the pieces joined and 
restored, and they are now mounted in a separate case in the Fossil 
Gallery of the Natural History Museum. The remarkable frontlet and 
antlers bearing no fewer than twenty-one points, with a span of forty- 
six inches, discovered by Mr G. P. Hughes beneath a peat deposit in the 
Cresswell Bog (Northumberland), is scarcely inferior to the Bakewell 
head. 
Another magnificent example, 47| inches long, and with a beam cir- 
cumference of 8 inches, was found during the digging of the Manchester 
Ship Canal, whilst another massive head bearing twenty-one points was 
recently found at Comber mere, in Cheshire. After these come many 
splendid specimens from Morecambe Sands, Blackburn, and other places 
in Lancashire too numerous to detail. 
In Scotland many fine heads have been found in the sands of Caithness 
and Sutherland, as well as in the peat bogs of Elgin, Forfar, Ayrshire, 
and the south-west of Scotland in general; but none of these approach 
the example found in the bed of the Halladale in 1869. The horns are extra- 
ordinarily massive; thicker, in fact, than modern Wapiti, and carry 
twenty -six points. 
The best example of an ancient Irish Red deer is in the collection at 
Colebrooke, Co. Fermanagh, formed by Sir Douglas Brooke and his 
father. With a span of 42| in., it bears twenty -three points, and is in a 
fine state of preservation. There are five fine ancient Irish heads, which 
I have recently seen, in Viscount Powerscourt’s collection, but they are 
all somewhat broken, and seem to be of more ancient origin than the 
Colebrooke specimen. 
Another beautiful head was discovered lately in Co. Leitrim. It has a 
span of 39| inches, and carries twenty-one points. 
G 
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