That this extinct group of animals inhabited for ages the countries in which their remains are now embedded, is rendered evident by their great numbers in some localities, and from their occurrence in various states of preservation, and in beds of various ages. The five hundred mammoths whose tusks and grinders were dragged up in thirteen years by the oyster dredgers of the Norfolk coast from a tract of submerged drift, could not all have been contemporary in a small corner of England, but must have represented several generations. And of course the two thousand grinders brought up from the exposed surface of the drift must have borne but a small proportion to the thousands still dispersed throughout the entire depth of the deposit. Any argument, however, founded on the mere numbers of these elephantine tusks and grinders, and which evaded the important question of species, might be eluded, however unfairly, by the assertors of a universal deluge. Floods certainly do at times accumulate, in great heaps, bodies of the same specific gravity; and why might not a universal flood have accumulated on this special tract of drift, the carcasses of many elephants? But it will be found greatly more difficult to elude the ingenious argument on the general question of Professor Owen. Next, perhaps, to the extinct elephant, one of the most numerous animals of this ancient group was the great Irish elk, _Megaceros Hibernicus_, a creature that, measured to the top of its enormous antlers, stood ten feet four inches in height, and exceeded in bulk and size the largest horses. Like all other species of the deer family, the creature annually shed and renewed its horns; "and a male deer may be reckoned," says Professor Owen, "to have left about eight pairs of antlers, besides its bones, to testify its former existence upon the earth. But as the female has usually no antlers, our expectations might be limited to the discovery of four times as many pairs of antlers as skeletons in the superficial deposits of the countries in which such deer have lived and died. The actual proportion of the fossil antlers of the great extinct species of British Pliocene deer (which antlers are proved by the form of their base to have been shed by the living animals) to the fossil bones of the same species, is somewhat greater than in the above calculation. Although, therefore, it may be contended that the swollen carcass of a drowned exotic deer might be borne along a diluvial wave to a considerable distance, and its bones ultimately deposited far from its native soil, _it is not credible that all the solid shed antlers of such species of deer could be carried by the same cause to the same distance_; or that any of them could be rolled for a short distance, with other heavy debris of a mighty torrent, without fracture and signs of friction. But the shed antlers of the large extinct species of deer found in this island and in Ireland