82 Mr. J. E. Harting on Forest Animals. 



to do, and tliey had better and more abundant pasturage 

 than now, when the woods are cut down and the land is 

 highly cultivated. Abundance of nutritious food usually 

 produces antlers of large growth. 



I have referred briefly to the character of the teeth in 

 Kuminants. Eed deer, both male and female, at one year 

 old have two cutting teeth in the lower jaw ; at two years 

 old they have four ; at three, six ; and at four, eight 

 cutting teeth in the low^er jaw. Stags when five years 

 old have two canines, or tusks, in the upper jaw ; and 

 occasionally, but rarely, very old hinds have these tusks 

 also, but less fully developed than in the stags. 



Deer pair in the autumn, a fact which the stags do not 

 fail to announce by their loud "belling," and by the 

 battles which they fight, w^hen the crashing of their antlers 

 may be heard at a considerable distance. The young are 

 brought forth in the summer-time, when a high growth of 

 fern favours their concealment. 



The red-deer very rarely produces more than one young 

 one at a birth.''' This is born in June, and, up to the age 

 of three or four months, is spotted with white like a 

 fallow-deer. Gradually it assumes a uniform colour. 



With regard to food, deer subsist chiefly on grass, leaves, 

 and tender shoots of trees, beech-mast, acorns, and even 

 fungus. Fallow-deer are very partial to horse-chestnuts ; 

 and both species are particularly fond of salt, which they 

 will come a long way to lick when they have once dis- 

 covered that it has been laid down for them. It is doubt- 

 less the saline flavour which attracts them to gnaw antlers 

 which have been shed ; and this in some measure accounts 

 for the infrequency with which such antlers are found. 

 Collyns was assured by keepers and hillmen of great 

 experience and undoubted veracity in Scotland that it is a 

 common occurrence for the hinds to eat the cast horns, 

 but he was never able to confirm it from his own expe- 

 rience in Devonshire and Somersetshire. During the past 



* So says Scrope, in his "Days of Deer Stalking;" but Collyns 

 mentions three instances in wliich red-deer hinds produced twins — 

 pp. 48,50. 



