It is strange how long this ignorance both as regards Ireland and the “Dark Continent” continued. One of the earliest names of Ireland, given her by her own native poets, is very descriptive, _Fidh-inis_, “the woody island.” This name at once brings before our minds the then characteristic feature of the country, even as its modern poetical designation, “The Emerald Isle,” depicts the luxuriant vegetation watered by the cloud-masses of the Atlantic. The bogs of Ireland, however, speak even more eloquently on this point than her bards, for in these bogs vestiges of ancient forests are found buried, sometimes at great depth below the present surface; the remains of oak, birch, mountain ash, alder, yew, beech, deal, &c., testify to the variety of the arboreous vegetation: they lie either prostrate in a horizontal position, or bear marks of having been felled by man. According to old bardic accounts, the first proceeding chronicled of the earliest settlers was the clearing of timber off many great plains in various parts of Ireland, evidently showing the paucity of arable land. _Wild Animals._--This continuous forest must have swarmed with wild animals of every description. Wolves, which even in the present day prove a scourge occasionally in parts of Europe, were numerous; the caves which abounded in the country were the home of the bear, and the boar fed beneath the deep forest shade. In these remote times, too, the Irish elk, with its huge, broad, branching antlers, a creature of immense size and strength, was existent. Remains of this gigantic deer, the _Megaceros Hibernicus_, have been found, covered by the peat at various depths, sometimes close to the surface; and from allusions in Irish poetry and legends[3] it is more than probable that it continued to exist down to a much later period than most of the other animals now extinct. In a very curious legend, one of the great Irish bards who is reputed to have lived in the third century, and to have himself attained a very advanced age, is described as reciting at a banquet a poem in which he extolled the greatness and strength of his contemporaries and forefathers, and described the tall gigantic deer hunted by them. His listeners laughed incredulously, whereat the old man rose in anger, and going to a neighbouring heap where were piled the relics of bygone hunts, he selected therefrom a shank-bone, and returning to the banquet, took from the table one of the shank-bones of the deer on which the guests were then feasting, and dropped it through the hollow of the bone he had brought in. This legend of the dim old times tends to prove that at a very remote period tradition alone kept up the memory of the Irish Bighorn.[4] The fact of the co-existence of the _Megaceros_ with man does not, however, rest on mere legend; for in a locality called the “Elk Hole,” Co. Wexford, numerous skeletons of the extinct deer have been found in company with the remains of man,