232 SEVENTH REPORT OF THE FOREST, FISH AND GAME COMMISSION. 



tion becomes wider, but the points fewer in number and shorter, until in a very old 

 specimen the upper part of the antler is merely scalloped along the edge, and the 

 web is of great breadth. In the older and finer specimens the brow antlers are more 

 complex, and show three points instead of two. 



A similar change takes place in the bell. This pendulous gland is long and narrow 

 in the young bull, but as he ages it shortens and widens, becoming eventually a sort 

 of dewlap under the throat. 



One of the best heads from Maine that I can recall, was in the possession of the 

 late Albert Bierstadt. The extreme spread of these antlers was 64 '4 inches. This 

 bull was killed in New Brunswick, near the Maine line, some twenty years ago ; 

 another famous Maine head was presented to President Cleveland during his first 

 term. Photographs of both of these heads appear herewith. Many very handsome 

 heads have been taken in the Ottawa district, the best one that I remember being 

 nearly si.x feet in extreme breadth. It is safe to assume that a little short of six feet 

 is the extreme width of an eastern head. 



The moose of the American Rockies are much smaller in body, and their antlers 

 are not very large, a four-foot head being decidedly rare. 



As we go north into British Columbia, through the head waters of the Peace and 

 Liard Rivers, the animal becomes very large in size, perhaps larger than anywhere 

 else in the world as far as his body is concerned ; but the antlers, while very large 

 and handsome, are not so massive as those of the great Alaskan moose. In fact, all 

 the moose of the Rocky Mountains from Wyoming to the Alaskan boundary have 

 relatively small antlers. 



In the Kenai peninsula and the country around Cook Inlet, Alaska, we find a 

 distinct species recently described as Alecs gigas. The animal itself has great bulk, 

 but perhaps not more so than the animals of the Cassiar Mountains. The antlers of 

 these Alaskan moose are simply huge, running, on the average, very much larger 

 and more complex than even picked heads from the east. These antlers, in addition 

 to their size, have a certain peculiarity in the position of the brow antlers, the plane 

 of which is more often turned at ncarl\- right angles to the plane of the palmation of 

 the main beam than in the eastern moose. In a high percentage of the larger heads 

 there is on one or both antlers an additional and secondary palmation. In the 

 arrangement and complexity of the brow antlers, and in the complexity produced 

 b}- this doubling of the beam, a startling resemblance is shown to the extinct Ccrv- 

 alces, a moose-like deer of Pleistocene times, possibly ancestral to the genus Alecs. 

 If this resemblance indicates any close relationship we have in the Alaskan moose a 

 survivor of the archaic type from which the true moose and Scandinavian elk have 



