156 Sport and Life. 



Society, on a young pronghorn in the gardens, purchased Dec. 4, 

 1879, that cast its horns on Oct. 18, 1880. The horns were shed 

 in the night, but no trace of them could be found. Mr. Forbes 

 suggested they had been carried off by a rat or a visitor, but it is 

 probable that the Antilocapra may, like the Cervidze, eat the shed 

 horns. Mr. Forbes' s remarks were illustrated by a .drawing, by 

 Mr. Smit, of the head of the animal immediately after the old horn 

 had been shed this is reproduced and also of the young horn 

 after four weeks' growth. The same animal shed its horns during 

 the following year, one on Nov. 15, the other on Nov. 24, thus 

 furnishing additional proof, if any were required, that the shedding 

 of the horns of the prongbuck is an annual process. 



When discussing the process of shedding, with Western hunters, 

 amongst whom many, if not the majority, refuse to believe in the 

 regular occurrence of it or deny it altogether, one generally is told 

 that were it really the case, that all adult antelopes annually shed 

 their horns, the latter would be found lying about. This, it is true, 

 one very rarely does, and, taken in conjunction with the disappear- 

 ance of the sheaths in the Zoological Gardens in the night o 

 1 8th October, 1880, it would point to the explanation suggested by 

 Mr. Tegetmeier, i.e., that they are eaten by them. In any case, 

 further light upon this point would be most acceptable. 



In 1894, while studying some MSS. in the private family library 

 of the Emperor at Vienna, I came across a curious bit of evidence 

 which would show that the fact of the antelope shedding its horns 

 was known already in the sixteenth century. In a beautifully 

 illustrated large folio MS. prepared for the Emperor Rudolph II., 

 by Tycho Brahe, the great astronomer, I found among the 

 numerous skilfully executed tinted drawings relating to curious 

 animals inhabiting distant lands, a perfectly correctly drawn 

 horn sheath of the American prong-buck. Its perfect fidelity 

 to nature, and the fact that no other animal bears horns of 

 anything like the same shape, dispels all doubt as to the 

 identity of the original, though, curiously enough, there is 

 some evidence to show that it was believed to be the horn 



