98 1 



Mule-Deer 



ride through it, a little more than a gunshot apart. The deer that lie in their course 

 are started from the grass, and bound, off ahead of the hunters, every now and then 

 showing their backs above the tops of the grass. The horsemen have to shoot from 

 the saddle, and very quickly, to secure their game." Sometimes these deer are shot 

 from canoes as they swim from island to island. 



The naked-eared deer ( C. gymnotis'} from Colombia and Ecuador ap- 

 Naked-Eared .... '._. . , , . . . . 



Deer pears to be a distinct species, distinguished from the Virginian deer by 



the large flapping ears, of which the outer surface is naked, by the 

 extreme narrowness of the head, and the more slender form. 



The most specialized of all the American deer as regards size and 



complexity of antlers is the mule-deer (C. macrotis}, so called on ac- 

 count of the enormous size of its ears. In this deer the antlers (as shown in a front 

 view in the acccompanying figure, 

 and in profile in the figure on p. 

 973), when compared with those 

 of the Virginian deer, have recov- 

 ered the relative importance of 

 the posterior prong, concomitantly 

 with a proportionate reduction of 

 the subbasal snag, and . are there- 

 fore much more regularly forked. 

 "At the same time," writes Mr. 

 A. G. Cameron, "the main 

 strength of the beam is drawn 

 into the anterior prong, and inter- 

 mediate forms occur both in this 

 and the last-named species, which 

 bridge the gap between the ex- 

 tremes on either side, and leave no 

 doubt as to their intimate relation- 

 ship. ' ' In general the front prong 

 is simply forked, while the second 

 divides into three or more snags 

 in adult bucks; but instances oc- 

 cur where the hinder prong is 

 unbranched, while in some indi- 

 viduals of the Virginian deer the same prong is divided. The antlers of the second 

 year are simply forked, in the third year the hinder prong is also forked; but the 

 forking of the front prong and the development of the subbasal snag does not take 

 place till the assumption of the fourth set of antlers. In the left antler represented 

 in the figure on p. 973, which is from a head in the collection of Mr. A. G. Cam- 

 eron, the length of the upper prong is twenty-eight, and that of the lower prong 

 twenty-nine inches along the curve, the basal girth being five and three-fourths 

 inches; but in the opposite one the upper prong measures twenty-nine and the lower 

 twenty-seven inches. The extreme span of these antlers is thirty-two inches. In 



HEAD OF MULE-DEER. 



