Page:The Zoologist, 3rd series, vol 1 (1877).djvu/161

Rh could have sojourned for ages in a country without leaving behind them traces of their former existence, not only in their cast antlers, but on account of the fact that they were much more numerous than the Carnivora which prey upon them.

, a native of Southern Europe, and still met with in several islands of the Mediterranean and elsewhere, has, on the discovery of a single horn in the mud of the Thames at Clacton, been supposed to have inhabited Great Britain in the days of the elephants, bears, and other animals of the post-glacial period.

was one of the earliest arrivals on British soil after the ice and snow of the glacial epoch began to disappear. It must have been very common in England and Ireland, and perhaps also in Scotland—at all events, after the great glaciers began to recede. Remains of the animal have been discovered in thirty caverns and in as many river deposits throughout England, and in Irish caverns, and in shell marl under Irish bogs and Scottish lakes. It is still plentifully distributed over the boreal regions of Europe, Asia, and America, but varies considerably in dimensions, and somewhat in the appearance of the antlers, in different countries; indeed, as regards height and weight, there are remarkable peculiarities in different regions. Thus the Reindeer of Lapland is small, as compared with the Siberian and Newfoundland forms; the former stands about three feet five inches, whilst the latter is on an average four feet two inches at the withers, their weights respectively being often 90 ℔s. and 300 ℔s. There is no evidence to show when the Reindeer disappeared from the British Isles, but it was contemporary with the Lion, Hyæna, and Elephant, and lingered on until the advent of man, whose flint tools have been discovered in the same deposits which contain its bones. The fossil remains, as compared with the bones of recent varieties, such as the Caribou or Great Woodland Reindeer of ofof [sic] Canada and the smaller forms of Northern Europe, approach, in the rounded beam and large brow antler and dimensions of bones, to the Norwegian and Lapland Reindeers, which are probably direct descendants of the old British stock; so that the