perceived that the spot had ever been dug into, or that any trials for coal had been made; but the noble proprietor, at Mr. Bakewell's suggestion, directed passages to be cut in various directions, and at length the indications of a former shaft were discovered, though the coal had not been worked. Into this shaft the man must have fallen, and the body been pressed and imbedded in the loose rubbly coal by a super- incumbent column of water, previously to the falling in of the pit.
Human remains imbedded with those of the fossil Elk of Ireland.—Of the extinct terrestrial mammalia of the British Isles, the gigantic Deer, commonly known as the fossil Irish Elk, is one of the most remarkable, from its magnitude and the abundance and excellent state of preservation of its remains. This noble animal was ten feet in height from the ground to the top of its antlers, which are palmated and measure fourteen feet from the extremity of one horn to the other. The bones of the Irish Elk occur in the beds of marl which underlie the peat-bogs, and are generally very perfect, being stained more or less deeply by tannin and iron, and sometimes partially incrusted with pale blue phosphate of iron: even the marrow occasionally remains in the state of a fatty substance, which will burn with a clear lambent flame. Groups of skeletons have been found crowded together in a small space, with the skulls elevated and the antlers thrown back upon the shoulders, as if a herd of deer had fled for shelter, or been driven into a morass and perished on the spot.[1]
Stone hatchets and fragments of pottery have been found with the bones of this creature, under circumstances that leave no doubt of a contemporaneous deposition. In the county of Cork, the body of a man, in good preservation, the soft parts being converted into adipocire, was exhumed from a marshy soil, beneath a peat-bog eleven feet thick: the body was enveloped in a deer-skin of such large dimensions as to lead to the conclusion that it belonged to the extinct Elk.[2]
A rib of this animal has been found in which there is a
- ↑ Skeletons of Mastodons have been found in the United States in like circumstances; and very recently remains of the colossal struthious birds of New Zealand, the Moa, or Dinornis, have been discovered by my eldest son, Mr. Walter Mantell, in a morass under similar conditions.
- ↑ Jamieson's Translation of Cuvier's Theory of the Earth.
