366 HOOFED ANIMALS 



nut, thickly spotted with white. When in velvet the antlers 

 are a bright chestnut red with black tips, giving the bucks a 

 strikingly handsome appearance. This animal has been 

 introduced into many English deer-parks. The males are 

 small but strong, and often carry off the hinds of the Red 

 Deer in face of the bigger red bucks. 



The Chinese Water Deer (Hydropotes inermis) frequents 

 the beds of rushes along river banks. Even the bucks 

 possess no antlers. Strangely enough, John Chinaman does 

 not care for the flesh of the animal, and consequently 

 it exists in rather large numbers. The Water Deer is an 

 adept at concealment ; in the park at Woburn Abbey, where 

 the Duke of Bedford keeps many specimens of foreign deer, 

 it is often difficult to discover the animal even in a grass 

 paddock. 



The Chinese Elaphure, or David's Deer (Cervus davi- 

 dianus), is practically only found in the Imperial hunting 

 park at Pekin, where M. David, a French naturalist, first saw 

 it from over the wall in 1865. Four years later a pair was 

 obtained for the Zoological Gardens in Regent's Park. The 

 antlers of the Elaphure are unlike those of any other Deer. 

 The beam ascends very abruptly, throwing off very near to 

 the base a back tine of enormous length. The Chinese call 

 it the Sze-poo-seang, which signifies ' Like none of the 

 Four,' i.e., the animal resembles neither the horse, cow, 

 deer, nor goat. 



MUSK DEEB (Moschus moschiferus). 

 Coloured Plate XXV. Fig. i. 



The Musk Deer of Central Asia, and the Himalayan 

 region in particular, was long one of the accredited wonders 

 of the animal kingdom. It so differs in various particulars 

 from any other of the Deer, that some naturalists prefer to 

 view it as forming a distinct family of its own. The absence 

 of antlers in both sexes is not wholly a distinctive charac- 

 teristic. Three special peculiarities are not external. The 

 Musk Deer is the only one of the Cervine family that 

 possesses no gall-bladder to the liver, which is so common a 



