148 Proceedings of the Royal Physical Society. 
ultimately to be shot owing to the damage it committed 
among the young trees. In the park at Dalkeith Palace, 
a single hind may now be seen feeding with the herd of 
Fallow Deer kept there. 
In former times the Red Deer must have been abundant 
and generally distributed in the south of Scotland. Tradition 
tells us that during the Middle Ages the Scottish kings and 
nobles were wont to hunt deer in the immediate neighbour- 
hood of Edinburgh, and doubtless such was the case, though 
there is little reliable historical evidence to point to. Such 
tales, for instance, as that of the royal hunt of Roslin, in which 
King Robert the Bruce is represented to have staked the forest 
and estate of Pentland against the head of Sir William St Clair, 
must be regarded as in the highest degree legendary (vide 
Wilson’s “Annals of Penicuik,” 1891, p. 165). The Red Deer, 
which was probably in most localities long survived by the Roe, 
must now have been extinct in the lowlands for many centuries. 
Even in the mountainous country around St Mary’s Loch, it 
seems to have been practically extinct for at least two hundred 
years. Professor Walker, after informing us that, according 
to Bishop Leslie, numerous stags of great size were found 
in the Meggat district about the year 1578, adds that the 
last of that region, after wandering solitary among the 
mountains for about thirty years, and- known to all the 
inhabitants, was killed on the neighbouring hills of Annan- 
dale in 1763 (“Mammalia Scotica,” 1808). It must indeed 
have been rare if it existed at all in that district in the 
beginning of the eighteenth century, for in Dr Pennecuik’s 
“History of Tweeddale,”’ published in 1715, it is thus 
referred to,—% Upon the head of this water [Meggat] is to 
be seen, first, a house deservedly called Dead-for-cald; then 
Wintrop-burn; Meggit-knows; the Crammel, which seems 
to have been an old hunting-house of our kings, for I saw 
in the hall thereof a very large Hart’s-horn upon the wall 
for a clock-pinn; the like whereof I observed in several 
other country men’s houses in that desart and solitary 
place, where both Hart and Hynd, Dae and Rae have been 
so frequent and numerous of old, as witness the name of the 
hill, Hartfield” (ed. 1815, p. 248). UHartlaw, Hartside, and 
