American Big Game in its Haunts 



that it was an Asiatic immigrant, not earlier than 

 the Pleistocene. 



From this intricate genealogical tangle one 

 turns with relief to the deer family, where the 

 course of development lies reasonably plain. If 

 the rank of animals in the aristocracy of nature 

 were to be fixed by the remoteness of the period to 

 which we know their ancestors, the deer would out- 

 rank their bovine cousins by a full half of the 

 Miocene period, and the study of fossils onward 

 from this early beginning presents few clearer lines 

 of evidence supporting modern theories respecting 

 the development of species, than is shown in the in- 

 creasing size and complexity of the antlers in suc- 

 ceeding geological ages, from the simple fork of 

 the middle Miocene to those with three prongs of 

 the late Miocene, the four-pronged of the Pliocene, 

 and finally to the many-branched shapes of the 

 Pleistocene and the present age. Now it is further 

 true that each one of these types is represented to- 

 day in the mature antlers of existing deer, from the 

 small South American species with a simple spike, 

 up to the wapiti and red deer carrying six or eight 

 points, and still more significant is it that the whole 

 story is recapitulated in the growth of each indi- 

 vidual of the higher races. The earliest cervine 



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