SEVENTH ANNUAL REPORT. 181 



species are being rapidly raised to the rank of full species through 

 the agency of man and his repeating rifle, and long before the 

 last word on this subject has been said, the animals themselves, 

 in many instances, will have disappeared. 



DISTINCTION IN TYPE. 



Before turning to the distribution of species, it may be well 

 to briefly mention the several characters which distinguish the 

 genus Rangifcr as a whole from the other genera of the deer 

 family. 



All the members of this subdivision of the Cervidae are ex- 

 tremely migratory in their habits, far more than any other deer, 

 and consequently range over large areas. Their most distin- 

 guishing character, however, is to be found in the structure of 

 the bones of the foot, where the so-called dew-claws attached to 

 the ends of the metacarpal bones are functional, and are of use 

 not only on glare ice, but in snow, and in the soft mossy bogs 

 and barrens the caribou frequent. If the development of the 

 metacarpal bones be given much weight, the nearest allies of this 

 genus would be the moose and the American deer (Odocoilciis). 

 With the former, further affinity is suggested by the palmation 

 of the antlers. Both the metacarpal structure and palmation, 

 however, are probably cases of parallel development, and would 

 not indicate any close relationship. The palmated antlers of the 

 fallow deer present another example of such parallelism. 



The presence of small horns on the females of this genus is 

 in striking contrast to their absence in all the other members of 

 the deer family. An effort has been recently made to show that 

 in the ancestral deer antlers were present in both sexes, in which 

 case their persistence among the caribou should be considered a 

 primitive character. I cannot see any reason why this theory 

 should be adopted in preference to the older view, which consid- 

 ered all antlers to be secondary sexual characters, and the antlers 

 of the female caribou an acquired rather than a primitive char- 

 acter. This point remains, however, unsettled. 



In the Woodland Caribou group one of the brow antlers is 

 frequently enormously developed, projecting far down on the 

 face, sometimes to the extremity of the nose, and serving as a 

 guard to the eyes and face during the combats of the stags. 



