GREA T IRISH DEER—STEIIERS SEA-- COW 241 
hunted by man at the time when he hunted reindeer in this part 
of Europe, but the age of the strata containing the remains is 
doubtful. Again, there is a rib in the Dublin Museum with a 
perforation which is sometimes taken to be the result of a wound 
from a dart, arrow, or spear; but the wound may have been 
inflicted by one of the sharp tynes in a fight between two bucks. 
Dr. Hart mentions the discovery of a human body in gravel, 
under eleven feet of peat, soaked in bog-water, in good preserva- 
tion, and completely clothed in antique garments of hair, which 
it has been conjectured might be that of the Great Deer. But if 
some individual animal had perished and left its body under the 
like circumstances, its hide and hair ought equally to have been 
preserved. Dr. Molyneux, to whom we owe the first account of 
its discovery, says that its extinction in Ireland has occurred “ so 
many ages past, as there remains among us not the least record 
in writing, or any manner of tradition, that makes so much as 
mention of its name ; as that most laborious inquirer into the 
pretended ancient but certainly fabulous history of this country, 
Mr. Roger O’Flaherty, the author of Ogygia, has lately informed 
me.”i 
In the romance of the Niebelungen,” now immortalised by 
Wagner, which was written in the thirteenth century, the word 
shelch occurs, and is applied to one of the beasts slain in a great 
hunt a few hundred years before that time in Germany. This 
word has been cited by some naturalists as probably signifying 
the Great Irish Deer. But this is mere conjecture, and the word 
might apply to some big Red Deer. The total silence of Caesar 
and Tacitus respecting such remarkable animals renders it highly 
improbable that they were known to the ancient Britons. 
Two entire skeletons of the male, with antlers measuring a little 
over nine feet from tip to tip, and one skeleton of the hornless 
doe, are to be seen set up in the middle of the long gallery No. i 
at the Natural History Museum. The drawing in Fig. 57 is from 
^ Philosophical Transactions^ vol. xix. p. 490. 
R 
