336 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, 



Every one who visits a museum of natural history experiences 

 surprise at sight of the moose, a kind of enormous deer. A clumsy 

 form, long legs, a thick muzzle, an extremely short neck, a tuft on 

 the withers, a dewlap fringed with hair under the threat, give the 

 animal an extraordinary appearance, which, in the male, is height- 

 ened by huge horns, flattened and serrated on the outer edge. The 

 moose inhabits the marshy forests of the northern parts of Europe 

 and America ; it is affirmed that it may still be found at some points 

 in eastern Germany, and it is chiefly met with in Sweden and Nor- 

 way, Lithuania, the north of Russia, Siberia, and Tartary. It was 

 formerly spread over all Germany, as the hunts of the middle ages 

 preserved in narratives prove. For the authors of the seventeenth 

 or eighteenth century the moose continues a tolerably common spe- 

 cies in Poland and Sweden, but is rare for the moderns. Though 

 become quite imcommon in Europe within a hundred years, it contin- 

 ued very abundant at the same period in the Northern United States 

 of America ; but every winter it is more eagerly pursued, and this 

 fine animal has ceased to be reckoned among the resources of food for 

 the inhabitants. 



In early days our European deer roved everywhere in herds under 

 the great forests, and now scarcely any of them exist in France, except 

 in particularly well-protected forests, where they may be counted by 

 single specimens. Every one has heard retired hunters say again and 

 again, in speaking of deer, " Very soon there will be no more of 

 them." The smaller ruminants, that delight in the cliffs of the high- 

 est mountains, and tlie neighborhood of glaciers, are spared as little. 

 The destruction of the chamois and wild-goat is going on with lament- 

 able rapidity, and it is completed with no other object than the desire 

 of exhibiting skill. The mountaineer is proud of liaving killed a cha- 

 mois, and if he kills several he thinks himself a personage deserving 

 admiration. Go to Switzerland, and they will show you, in a hundred 

 places, some part of the mountains where herds of chamois were for- 

 merly seen, and you will hear it almost uniformly declared that now 

 there are very few of them, or none at all, left. Go to the Pyrenees ; 

 in that region, where the chamois is called the isar, they will tell you 

 that the isar is now exceedingly rare. The chamois, the single Euro- 

 pean representative of the antelope group, being found scattered over 

 all the great mountains of Europe, will doubtless long maintain itself 

 against the unceasing pursuit of hunters ; but the pretty wild-goat of 

 the Alps, once very widely spread, no longer exists, except in a very 

 confined jtart of the Piedmontese Alps, and perhaps in some nook of 

 Mont Blanc. The chamois and goat, agile animals frequenting most 

 inaccessible regions, swift to fly at the approach of danger, often 

 escaped the hunter's aim when the weapon carried no great distance ; 

 long-range guns have become the scourge of Alpine animals. 



Thus, within historic times, the Hos primigenius^ the huge, great- 



