460 CERVUS. 



the extinct Deer followed the same laws which govern the 

 succession of the antlers in the existing species. 



The first direct evidence on this point was adduced by 

 Professor Phillips, who, in reporting on a donation to the 

 Yorkshire Philosophical Society by G. L. Fox, Esq., of a 

 rich collection of remains of the Megaceros from near 

 Waterford, states ; " There is among the specimens the 

 head of a female without horns."* I owe chiefly to the 

 kind interest which the Earl of Enniskillen has been 

 pleased to take in the researches connected with the pre- 

 sent work, the opportunity of examining three skulls of 

 the Megaceros, which, evidently mature by their size and 

 state of dentition, and without a trace of the pedestal or 

 place whence antlers could have been shed, must be con- 

 cluded to have belonged to the female sex. One of these 

 is the subject of cut 187. 



They very nearly equal in length the skull of the male ; 

 but the occipital bones, and especially the condyles, are 

 smaller, the transverse eminence at the back part of the 

 frontal is wanting, and in its place there rises a longitu- 

 dinal prominence (fig. 188, a,) from the posterior half of 

 the frontal suture, like the median prominence in the skull 

 of the Giraffe. The supraorbital foramen is as large as in 

 the skull of the male ;^ the preorbital vacuity (fig. 187, 5,) 

 is somewhat larger than I have usually found it in the 



* 'Report of the Yorkshire Philosophical Society," 1836. 



f Dr. Hart, in his description of the skeleton of the Megaceros, says (p. 1 9) 

 " There is a depression on each side in front of the root of the antler and over the 

 orbit capable of lodging the last joint of the thumb, at the bottom of which is the 

 superciliary hole, large enough to give passage to an artery proportioned to the 

 size of the antler." This foramen, however, is equally large in the female. I 

 have injected the skull of a Fallow-deer with the antlers ' in velvet ;' they 

 were supplied by two large branches sent off from the external temporal ar- 

 tery, where it passes behind the orbit : doubtless, the arteries of the antlers had 

 as little connection with the cavity of the orbit, or its superior perforation in the 

 Megaceros. 



