Page:The Zoologist, 3rd series, vol 1 (1877).djvu/118

92 River Boyne above Leinster Bridge (Co. Kildare), along with a skull of Brown Bear (Scott, Journ. Geol. Soc. Dublin, vol. x. p. 151). This last case would have been taken as decisive that the animal lived in Ireland in prehistoric times as a contemporary of the Brown Bear, had not a silver collar round its neck proved that it had belonged to "a member of Lord Rosse's family."

From premises so unsatisfactory as those which have been examined, it seems to me very hazardous to conclude with Dr. Jeitteles that the Fallow Deer inhabited Northern and Central Europe in the pleistocene and prehistoric ages. The point, to say the very least, is non-proven. On the other hand, the non-discovery of certain relics of the animal by the many able naturalists who have examined vast quantities of fossil remains from those regions, implies, to my mind, the probability that the animal was not then in those parts of Europe. The value of negative evidence depends upon the number of observations, which in this case is enormous. To speak personally, I am in the position of a man waiting for satisfactory proof, holding that up to the present time the common Fallow Deer "has never been found to occur in the fossil state in Northern and Central Europe. The animal ought to be found fossil in those regions; and it is not for want of looking that it has not yet been found.

For the sake of clearness, I have reserved the reference to other forms of deer, in the essay, for separate discussion. The Cervus polignacus of Pomel, from Auvergne, is an obscure form without definition, about which I will not venture to say anything. The C. somonensis of Cuvier, which I have carefully studied in Paris along with Prof. Gervais, is identical with the form which I have described from Clacton, Essex (Quart. Geol. Journ., 1868, p. 514), under the name of Cervus Brownii. The latter has been identified by Prof. Busk among the fossil remains from Acton Green. The typical antler of Cuvier's species differs from plate xvii., fig. 4 of C. Brownii, in the possession of a palm of four points, and in being broken and badly restored with plaster at the point where the third tine, d, of my figure joins the beam. Whether this kind of antler belongs to a well-marked variety of Fallow Deer or to a closely-allied species, I will not offer an opinion. It seems, however, safer to follow Professors Lartet, Gaudry, and most of the naturalists since the days of Cuvier, in keeping the fossil separate from the living forms, none of which present, so far as I know, a similar