AND MANAGEMENT. 21 



do not drive the polled haviars, so they keep up their 

 fat, particularly in a good acorn year, while the full 

 heads are driven about very much by the bucks, and 

 they lose fat very fast in consequence ; the polled ones 

 are longer in coming to venison, and are not usually so 

 large as the others. This is a very interesting subject, 

 for it displays such a mysterious sympathy between the 

 different members of one organism; for instance, an 

 injury to the testicle from any cause will generally 

 manifest itself in the malformation of the horn, and 

 even a broken or injured leg will almost always give 

 rise to a small and deformed horn on the head of a 

 buck. Sir Everard Home, who was serjeant-surgeon 

 to George IV., experimented upon a full-head by boring 

 a hole into each of his horns, and inserting a tube ther- 

 mometer, the heat was found to be 84 deg. ; he then 

 divided the nerve between the eye and the horn, one 

 side of the head only, and in less than a quarter of an 

 hour the temperature of the horn was reduced 10 deg., 

 and some time after, when the deer was killed, in 1825, 

 Sir E. Home appended the following lines to the pre- 

 served head : 



A votive offering here these horns I've placed, 



Since 'twas in them the source of heat I traced. 



From ganglionic nerves that it's derived, 



I proved upon this head while yet it lived ; 



Both horns exactly stood at eighty-four, 



One, when 'twas nerved, lost ten degrees or more. 



I have a horn before me which was shed on the i/*th 

 of April from a five-year-old deer that I castrated at 

 four years old. The end of March in the previous year 

 he was caught and operated upon as he showed strong 

 symptoms of going rotten ; in fact, he was what we 

 technically term " green single," and fit only for the 

 purpose of experiment at that time. After being ope- 

 rated upon he w r as put into a shed and fed upon dry 

 food for a few weeks. He was then let into the park, 

 when he put up a pair of well formed horns, which, 



