460 CERVUS. 
the extinct Deer followed the same laws which govern the 
succession of the antlers in the existing species. 
The first direct evidence on this point was adduced by 
Professor Phillips, who, in reporting on a donation to the 
Yorkshire Philosophical Society by G. L. Fox, Esq., of a 
rich collection of remains of the Megaceros from near 
Waterford, states; ‘‘ There is among the specimens the 
head of a female without horns.”* I owe chiefly to the 
kind interest which the Earl of Enniskillen has been 
pleased to take in the researches connected with the pre- 
sent work, the opportunity of examining three skulls of 
the Megaceros, which, evidently mature by their size and 
state of dentition, and without a trace of the pedestal or 
place whence antlers could have been shed, must be con- 
cluded to have belonged to the female sex. One of these 
is the subject of cut 187. 
They very nearly equal in length the skull of the male; 
but the occipital bones, and especially the condyles, are 
smaller, the transverse eminence at the back part of the 
frontal is wanting, and in its place there rises a longitu- 
dinal prominence (fig. 188, @,) from the posterior half of 
the frontal suture, like the median prominence in the skull 
of the Giraffe. The supraorbital foramen is as large as in 
the skull of the male ;+ the preorbital vacuity (fig. 187, 4,) 
is somewhat larger than I have usually found it in the 
* © Report of the Yorkshire Philosophical Society,’ 1836. 
+ Dr. Hart, in his description of the skeleton of the Megaceros, says (p. 19) 
“There is a depression on each side in front of the root of the antler and oyer the 
orbit capable of lodging the last joint of the thumb, at the bottom of which is the 
superciliary hole, large enough to give passage to an artery proportioned to the 
size of the antler.” This foramen, howeyer, is equally large in the female. I 
have injected the skull of a Fallow-deer with the antlers ‘in velvet;’ they 
were supplied by two large branches sent off from the external temporal ar- 
tery, where it passes behind the orbit: doubtless, the arteries of the antlers had 
as little connection with the cavity of the orbit, or its superior perforation in the 
Megaceros. 
