152 Sport and Life. 



The few remarks I propose to make relate to a circumstance 

 which, until recent years, seems to have escaped the ken of the 

 naturalist, and which even now is the subject of dispute among 

 those who have hunted the prongbuck. I allude to the shedding of 

 its horns, or, more correctly, the dropping of the sheath which 

 covers the core. It was considered so contrary to all zoological 

 experience that a hollow horned ruminant should shed its horns, 

 that when the first definite information upon this point came 

 before Professor Baird, of the Smithsonian, he refused to publish 

 the letter of Dr. Cranfield, of California, in which the latter posi- 

 tively asserted the truth of this fact. Audubon and Bachmann's 

 "Quadrupeds of North America" denies it, for on page 198 we 

 find the following sentence : " It was supposed by the hunters of 

 Fort Union that the prong-horned antelope dropped its horns, 

 but as no person had ever shot or killed one without these 

 ornamental and useful appendages, we managed to prove the ' 

 contrary to the men at the fort by knocking off the bony part 

 of the horn and showing the hard, spongy membrane beneath, 

 well attached to the skull and perfectly immovable." As Mr. 

 Tegetmeier, in an interesting article in the Field (August 10, 

 1889), from which I have, with his permission, borrowed the 

 illustrations here given, very truly says : " As not infrequently 

 happens, the practical hunters were right and the naturalists 

 wrong." 



It was left to Mr. Bartlett, the Superintendent of the Zoological 

 Gardens, to make the first authoritative announcement of this 

 curious fact, but even then some naturalists refused to believe 

 its truth, and no less an authority than Professor F. Cope, in 

 a note published in the 'American Naturalist, 1878, stated 

 that, after several years familiarity with the animal in a wild 

 state, he never met with an undoubted case of shedding the horn 

 sheath. 



It is singular that doubts should exist regarding a fact which is 

 now as well ascertained as any fact can be in natural history. As 

 previously stated, it was first definitely described by Mr. Bartlett, 



