316 THE DEER OF AMERICA. 



give the least credence to the stones of the ancients of a hybrid 

 from the bull and the mare, which the French called jumar. 

 Although they are less unlike each other than the wolf and the 

 sheep, still the boundary between them is far too broad to render 

 interbreeding in the remotest degree probable. Still less dissim- 

 ilar are the Cervidse and the Bos, for their digestive and genera- 

 tive organs ai'e on the same general plan, but in other respects 

 they are so very dissimilar in their organization and economy, 

 that we should require the most conclusive proof before we could 

 believe that their union could ever prove fertile. The most con- 

 spicuous, or at least obvious distinction is, that one has a hollow, 

 permanent horn, while that of the other is solid and temporary. 

 A much closer alliance, or at least similitude, is found between 

 the goat, the sheep, and the antelope, and yet all naturalists have 

 agreed in placing them in separate genera ; but for all this, I 

 know not how to reject the evidence that the sheep and the goat 

 have sometimes propagated together, and that their hybrid off- 

 spring have proved permanently fertile. How much more read- 

 ily, then, may we admit the interbreeding of closely allied species 

 — as all the deer certainly are, — and that their hybrids should 

 sometimes bo capable of reproduction, although the repugnance is 

 so great that when unconstrained they do not approach each 

 other. Tlie wapiti deer is so much larger than any of the other 

 species in my grounds, that I have never conceived the possibility 

 of hybridizing them ; and indeed the moose is the only member 

 of the family on this continent, with which we might expect no 

 great difficulty in an attempt to breed them together, although 

 the size of the woodland caribou is not so inferior as to render 

 the attempt absolutely unpromising. 



The red deer of Europe (C. elapJms'), resembles most our elk 

 or wapiti deer, and I state my reasons in another place, for con- 

 sidering them if not absolutely identical in species, at least very 

 nearly allied, and that probably they have descended from the 

 same ancestors. I have been so much interested with the fol- 

 lowing account of hybridizing the wapiti and the red deer, — if 

 that be the true term, — from " Land and Water," that I cannot 

 do better than to copy it : — 



" The Prince Pless, who has large possessions in Silesia, has suc- 

 ceeded, after repeated trials, in obtaining a cross between the Wapiti 

 (Oei-vus Canadensis), and the common red deer. 



"In 1862 the Prince bought fourteen Wapitis from Count Arco, a Ba- 

 varian gentleman, who had reared these from four brought from Canada 



