236 ODD HOURS WITH NATURE 



animals which graze on the hills share it, and 

 Highland cattle have been seen greedily chewing 

 at the skeleton of a dead sheep hardly past the 

 carrion stage. 



The production of antlers year by year must 

 be of some use to the species which produces 

 them, but the case of some extinct deer suggests 

 that a point may be reached when whatever advan- 

 tage big horns bring is more than counterbalanced 

 by the drain of producing and the labour of carry- 

 ing them. In the case of the Irish elk which 

 was not an elk at all, but a true deer the antlers 

 frequently measured nine feet across, and weighed 

 as much as from eighty to ninety pounds. When 

 one thinks that this " mighty mass of osseous 

 matter " was thrown out in the course of a few 

 months every summer and discarded every winter, 

 one can readily believe that the sheer uneconomy 

 of it contributed heavily to the fate which befel 

 the animal. 



