248 ANTLERS 



shot in 1814, 1 or the grand seventeen-pointer from 

 Gordon Castle, shot in Glenfiddich in 1831. 2 



'It is curious/ observes Mr. Walter Winans in his 

 treatise on Deer-breeding for Fine Heads? ' that Scot- 

 tish stags are at the present time the worst in Europe.' 

 It would be strange if they were not, having regard to 

 the conditions of climate, exposure, and food with 

 which they have to contend. The real wonder is that 

 they have not degenerated still further from the mag- 

 nificent animals that once roamed the Caledonian 

 forest that fine type which, as shown by the size 

 of bones and horns exhumed from peat-mosses and 

 estuaries in Scotland, was -once no whit inferior to 

 the red deer which now inhabit the Caucasus, the 

 Carpathians, Asia Minor, and, it may be added, certain 

 English parks. Originally and constitutionally the red 

 deer was a woodland dweller, resorting, no doubt, to 

 high bare ground in the heat of summer to escape 

 the torment of flies, and to browse on the fine flush of 

 upland grass, but ever relying upon the forest the 

 true forest for shelter, warmth, and food in winter. 

 Man stripped the land of trees, expelling the deer from 

 plain and valley, and confining them to storm-swept 

 wastes at high altitudes. It is through a grim kind of 

 irony that the term ' deer forest ' has come to connote 



1 It is doubtful whether the Kinlochewe horns, with their extra- 

 ordinary width of spread, stand now as they did on the stag's head 

 when living. Probably, if the piece of skin covering the junction 

 were removed, it would be found that the horns had been sawn off 

 the skull and reset at a wider angle. 



2 This splendid stag weighed 37 stone 7 lb. as he fell on 21st Sep- 

 tember. The length on outside curve of each antler is forty inches. 



1 London, Eowland Ward, 1913. 



