Long long ago too, before there was a single brick where London stands, and when the few human beings who were living were obliged to hide themselves in caves, great lions might have been heard roaring at night in the forests of the Thames Valley. The bones of this lion have been found in many different parts of England, and a terrible fellow he must have been, for some of his canine teeth (the long sharp teeth in cats and dogs) were more than six inches long. Indeed they were like small swords, and this is why he has been called the “sabre-toothed” lion. There were also bears, like the great grisly bear of America, and leopards, hyenas, and wolves, and besides two kinds of ox far larger than those we have now. But one of the handsomest animals was the great Irish stag. When standing upright the top of his horns would be as high as two tall men. He was indeed a fine fellow with his immense spreading antlers. The deer in our parks would look dwarfs beside him. He inhabited both England and Ireland: but, being found more often in Ireland, he has got the name of the _Irish_ stag. As many as thirty of the skeletons of these stags have been found together under a bog in Ireland, and in some of the bones the marrow is still preserved, and they burn well. Fences have been made of these bones in Ireland, and when the people of a small village in the county of Antrim heard of the battle of Waterloo they made a great bonfire of the bones and horns of the Irish stag to rejoice over the victory. I dare say these stags were hunted by wolves, and perhaps driven on to the ice of ancient lakes, where they broke through and got drowned, for so many of their skeletons are found together. I could not pass this magnificent stag by without giving you a picture of him.[17] He was a much nobler looking animal than the reindeer, which lived along with him at the time in England, and from his appearance I should say he was a swift runner and great fighter. Some antlers have been found locked together, just as these stags died in mortal combat, and I never see Sir Edwin Landseer’s beautiful picture of two red-deer stags fighting without thinking what a grand sight it would have been to see two of these great Irish stags rushing at each other with their powerful horns. Not one of those animals is living now, and none of them is mentioned in any history or tradition whatever, and though there is no doubt that men living in Europe saw the mammoth alive (as you will find in the next chapter), they knew of no kind of writing in which to tell us of them; these fossils are the only records left, but they speak plainly enough of the time when England and the whole of Europe were inhabited by these races of huge animals. [Illustration: IX. _The Megatherium._]