68 Sport and Life. 



One word more and I have done with this record head. It is 

 to express regret that Sheard, the owner of this wonderfully wide 

 68in. trophy, did not leave the antlers unmounted. It would have 

 allayed any possible suspicion of the spread being artificially 

 obtained, and, besides, would have permitted the weight to be 

 ascertained at all times. I do not think that it is too niuch to say 

 that natural history lays upon all persons claiming to be the owners 

 of record specimens the moral obligation to facilitate as much as 

 possible a verification of their claim. 



In the eyes of the connoisseur of antlers the wapiti head and 

 be it the finest ever bagged lacks one important point of merit, 

 one which distinguishes the European red deer, and endows a fine 

 head of that species with a beauty all its own. It is that wapiti 

 antlers never form a " crown " or cup-shaped cluster of tines on 

 top, but invariably bifurcate to the very end. I am convinced that 

 there is no regular crowned wapiti head in existence; the one 

 depicted by Caton, and which he says is the only one he has ever 

 met with, has the crown only on the right side. 



The student of the older literature on America is struck by the 

 scarcity of written and pictorial records relating to the wapiti, 

 considering that this deer was plentifully represented in the Atlantic 

 States. With one single exception, none of the early travellers who 

 published their accounts in the latter half of the sixteenth and the 



reference to my criticism, "that on the authority of Mr. Sheard (the owner 

 of the specimens), who supplied Mr. Rowland Ward with the particulars 

 he gives in his ' Records of Big Game,' the measurements and locality as 

 published are correct." In the face of the evidence which I have adduced in 

 the above, 1 am inclined to ihink that the editorial correction is based upon 

 a mistake, and that the cable inquiry which I am informed was made by 

 Rowland Ward simply proved a fact which was never in dispute, viz., that the 

 dimensions he gives are correct, the fact that they belong to two or three 

 trophies and not to one having probably escaped the necessarily brief cable 

 inquiry. That one and the same wapiti head should be by far the longest, 

 by far the widest, and by far the thickest in the beam of which we have any 

 record, is, so far as my experience goes, so extraordinary a combination as to 

 be next to impossible, and this view, I may add, is shared by all those versed in 

 antler lore with whom I have conversed about it. 



