Ill 



of the specimens. A large pair of horns weighs about six pounds, but 

 there are few over four or five pounds in weight." " The colour of this 

 animal varies with the seasons ; in the autumn and winter it is blueish 

 gray ; in the spring reddish, becoming blueish in the fall. Beneath the 

 chin, throat, belly, inner side of legs and un-ier side of tail white. The 

 fawns are at first red, and spotted with white along the sides. In the 

 autumn of the first year they lose the white spots, and thereafter are 

 the colour of the old ones. The hair is flattened and angular, that upon 

 the under side of the tail long and white. The average length of this 

 species is, from the nose to the root of the tail, five feet four inches, 

 length of the tail without the hairs, six or seven inches, with the hairs 

 upwards of one foot. The females bring forth in May or June, one or 

 two, rarely three at a birth." 



Occasionally specimens of this deer are found of a pure white colour, 

 with the pink shade in the eye denoting the albino. I have seen two 

 or three marked with irregular patches of white on various parts of the 

 body. On one occasion, a few years ago, I shot a fine buck at Hemlock 

 Lake, in the County of Ottawa, in the skin of which white haii's predo- 

 minated so much as to give the animal quite a white appearance. A 

 large doe was brought down by another of the party on the same day 

 with precisely the same peculiarity. A few years ago Mr. Neil Morrison, 

 of this city, had a magnificent white buck carrying a fine pair of horns. 

 As a lusus naturae in the animal creation, of extraordinary elegance and 

 beauty, this lovely specimen was unrivalled. The pure and uniform 

 whiteness of his skin was almost beyond belief. This rare and valuable 

 specimen was caught in deep snow, when almost three years old, about 

 thirty miles up the Gatineau River. It afterwards came into the 

 possession of the Hon. E. W. Scott, who kept it with a number of red 

 deer in a park for some time, where it ultimately died. If a deer be 

 killed in water during the interval of the red coat, say from June until 

 the middle of August, the carcase will sink to the bottom. At all other 

 seasons the dead body will float. From recent accounts given by 

 sportsmen in Forest and Stream and in the American Field, we learn 

 that the largest male of the virginian species has been found to weigh 

 something over three hundred pounds gross weight ; while in the latter 

 journal of January 16th, 1884, it is stated by Mr. Cyrus Butler, of 



