124 NATURAL HISTORY. 



determination of blood to the head in the animal ; the new growth, a fibro- 

 cartilaginous substance, is nourished by blood vessels, which ramify 

 on the exterior, covered by a sensitive velvety skin ; whether this be true 

 venous blood or a specialised fluid of a more albuminous nature is a 

 question which has not as yet to my knowledge been solved. Anyhow, a 

 blood-like fluid is conveyed along the growth of the horn feeding the 

 bony deposits, and it may be that abnormal sprouts are the result of an 

 aneurism in one of the blood channels ; but if this be so, my horn brings up 

 another question, for if you will look at the normal antler you will see an 

 excrescence exactly corresponding with the extra tine, yet not so fully 

 developed. Is this tlie sympathy that one sees exemplified in cases of 

 toothache ? The decay of a particular tooth on one side is frequently 

 followed by that of the corresponding one on the other. If this particular 

 stag had been allowed to live for another year, would both antlers have 

 shown an 'additional tine, or would they have reverted to the normal 

 shape? There is no reason why such deviations should be perpetuated 

 in the same individual or transmitted to his descendants. It was thought 

 at one time that the spike buck of America, which is the many-antlered 

 Cariacus virgimanus, found occasionally with a single-spiked horn, was a 

 freak of nature transmitted from the first so formed buck to his progeny, 

 and this was gravely advanced in an American Scientific Journal, and it 

 was asserted that the spike horn bucks were gradually crowding out the 

 antlered ones on the principle of the survival of the fittest, however better 

 informed naturalists like Judge Caton proved that these were merely 

 young bucks of the first year whose second season saw them with branch- 

 ing horns. 



I am inclined to think that there is neither persistence nor transmission 

 in the abnormalities of antlered deer. I believe in injury being the cause 

 of these freaks. 



Sympathy in certain cases of bodily injury affects the horn of that 

 particular side, and this is permanent through life, and in such cases the 

 horns are not shed. 



There is a curious bifurcation of the tip of the bez tine in the right 

 antler of a Cashmere Stag's horns in my collection, which must have 

 occurred whilst the point was tender ; and this reminds me of what I 

 have recently read in the second volume of the transactions of the Linnean 

 Society of New York regarding the growth of antlers. It is the com- 

 monly received idea, accepted by most naturalists, that the blood vessels 

 contract at the burr or base of the horn on its arrival at full growth, and 

 that then, the velvet dries up and is rubbed off by the animal, but 

 the Hon'ble Judge Caton, of Ottawa, Illinois, from observations made in 

 his own deer park, states : " The evidence derived from a very great 



