234 Game of Europe, W. & N. Asia & America 



THE NORTHERN PEKIN SIKA 



[Cervus hortuloruiii) 

 (Plate IV. Fig. 4) 



Among the spoils acquired at the sack of the Imperial Summer Palace 

 at Pekin in the autumn of i860 were the skins of certain deer shot in the 

 hunting grounds. Three of these came into the hands of the late Mr. 

 R. Swinhoe, then H.B.M. Consul in China, and in the following year 

 were received by the Zoological Society ot London. One ot them was 

 described the same year by the late Dr. Gray under the name of Ccrviis 

 pscuJaxis, and is now preserved among the collection of the British 

 Museum. This skin is in the early winter coat, and the small size of the 

 antlers indicates that it belonged to a three-year-old stag. The name 

 C psciiihixis was not invented by Gray for the deer represented by this 

 particular skin, but had been applied many years previously to a species of 

 which the type specimen has been lost, and whose affinities it appears 

 now impossible to determine. In 1864 Swinhoe came to the conclusion 

 that his Pekin deer was not the same as C pseiuhixis (whatever that may 

 be), and accordingly renamed it C hortulorum^ on account of its having 

 been first discovered in the park of the Summer Palace. 



In 1876 Professor L. Taczanowski described in the Procecdiftgs of the 

 Zoological Society of London a deer from the southern Ussuri district of 

 North-Eastern Manchuria, which he regarded as new, and named after the 

 explorer Dybowski, with the title of Ccrvi/s ilybowskii. The type specimen 

 ot this so-called species was in the winter dress. And it was not till the 

 arrival ot living specimens at Woburn Abbey that it was possible to 

 establish the identity of this form with Swinhoe's Pekin deer. 



In truth it is no wonder that years elapsed before the identification was 



