it seems not
unlikely, however, that it inhabited Ireland when man had already made
his appearance on the island. Although its remains are found in such
extraordinary abundance in Ireland, it certainly did not originate
there. It lived also in England and Scotland, and in the Isle of Man, in
France, Denmark, Germany, Austria, North Italy, and Russia. Its remains
have been discovered even in Siberia. It must either have originated in
Europe and then migrated to Asia, or have had its birthplace in Asia and
wandered to Europe. There is nothing to lead any one to assert
positively that either of these two continents was the one in which the
original home of the Irish Elk was situated, and we can only be guided
in this case by the history of its nearest relatives. These are the
Fallow Deer (_Cervus dama_). There are two very closely allied species,
the Persian and the European, but several others have been discovered in
the Forest-Bed and the pliocene deposits of the Auvergne. As no remains
of the Fallow Deer are known from Asia, it seems probable that it and
also the Irish Elk originated in Southern Europe, and only invaded Asia
in early pleistocene times.

The Mammoth (_Elephas primigenius_) is a familiar example among a large
number of mammals which have come to us about the same time from Asia by
the Asia Minor route. It had a much wider range than the Irish Elk,
since its remains have been discovered in a large number of European
localities as far west as Ireland, also in Siberia, and even North
America. Though we have had _Proboscidea_ in Europe from the Middle
Miocene onwards, Mr. Lydekker (_d_, p. viii.) holds that "our
comparatively full knowledge of Lower Miocene and Upper Eocene mammalian
faunas of the greater part of Europe and North America, renders it
almost certain that neither of those regions was the home of the direct
ancestors of the _Elephantidae_; and we must therefore look forward to
the discovery of mammaliferous Lower Miocene or Upper Eocene strata in
some other region of the (probably old) world which may yield these
missing forms."

The genus _Elephas_ makes its first appearance in the Upper Miocene of
India. Our European _E. antiquus_ is, according to Professor Zittel,
probably identical with _E. armeniacus_ of Asia Minor, while _E.
meridionalis_ agrees in all essential characters with the Indian _E.
hysudricus_. The Indian and European species of fossil elephants
altogether are very closely rela