. The testimony of the rocks; . testify its former existence upon the earth. Butas the female has usually no antlers, our expectations mightbe limited to the discovery of four times as many pairsof antlers as skeletons in the superficial deposits of thecountries in which such deer have lived and died. Theactual proportion of the fossil antlers of the great extinctspecies of British Pliocene deer (which antlers are provedby the form of their base to have been shed by the livinganimals) to the fossil bones of the same species, is some-what greater than in the above calculation. Although,therefor
. The testimony of the rocks; . testify its former existence upon the earth. Butas the female has usually no antlers, our expectations mightbe limited to the discovery of four times as many pairsof antlers as skeletons in the superficial deposits of thecountries in which such deer have lived and died. Theactual proportion of the fossil antlers of the great extinctspecies of British Pliocene deer (which antlers are provedby the form of their base to have been shed by the livinganimals) to the fossil bones of the same species, is some-what greater than in the above calculation. Although,therefore, it may be contended that the swollen carcass ofa drowned exotic deer might be borne along a diluvial THE NOACHIAN DELUGE. 331 wave to a considerable distance, and its bones ultimatelydeposited far from its native soil, it is not credible that allthe solid shed antlers of such sjyecies of deer could hecarried by the same cause to the same distance; or thatany of them could be rolled for a short distance, with other Fig. MEGACEROS HIBERNICUS. (Irish Elk.) heavy debris of a mighty torrent, without fracture andsigns of friction. But the shed antlers of the large extinctspecies of deer found in this island and in Ireland have 332 THE NOACHIAN DELUGE. commonly their parts or branches entire as when they fell;and the fractured specimens are generally found in caves,and show marks of the teeth of the ossivorous hymnas bywhich they had been gnawed; thus at the same timerevealing the mode m which they were introduced intothose caves, and proving the contemporaneous existence inthis island of both kinds of mammalia.^ But the contents of the bone caves, consisting in largepart of the extinct mammals, ought of themselves to bedecisive in this question. As the opening of the Kirkdalecavern is only about four feet each way, a diluvial wave,charged with the wreck of the lower latitudes, couldscarce have washed into such an orifice any considerablenumber of the intertropical animals. A
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