CHAPTER II 



THE COEFFICIENT OF CONSTANT GROWTH- 

 PARTITION ; AND SOME SPECIAL CASES 



§ i. The Heterogony of Deer Antlers 



THERE are certain special cases so important to a 

 study of relative growth that they deserve a chapter 

 to themselves. 



The first is that of the antlers of deer. As is well known, 

 these are shed each year, and replaced the year after by a 

 totally new growth. Usually, each new growth is larger than 

 the preceding growths, but in old age, illness, or other especially 

 unfavourable conditions, the weight (and number of ' points ') 

 may decrease. An analysis of the normal growth of the 

 antlers of a number of individual red deer (Cervus elaphus) 

 and of the factors affecting that growth, is given in Huxley 

 (1926). 



Further, casual inspection is sufficient to indicate that 

 relative antler-weight increases with absolute body-weight, 

 as is stressed by Champy (1. c). To obtain quantitative data, 

 however, was not easy. After much search, I hit on the 

 papers of Dombrowski (1 889-1 892) published many years ago 

 in an obscure periodical — the only papers to my knowledge to 

 contain the body-weights and antler-weights of large numbers 

 of Red deer and Roe deer. These data, supplemented by 

 those of Rorig (1901), by scattered cases in the literature, and 

 by information privately supplied to me by sportsmen, have 

 now been analysed by me (Huxley, 1927, and 1931). It 

 appears quite definitely that although there may be much 

 individual variation even in one locality, and though extraneous 

 agencies such as the amount of lime in the soil affect relative 

 antler-weight considerably, yet when the mean of considerable 



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