SPORT AND TRAVEL 109 



great stags, brought down to Constantinople from 

 no one exactly knows where, though probably from 

 the wild mountainous country to the south of the 

 Black Sea. 



One of these heads measures forty-eight and a half 

 inches along the beam, carries twenty-one points, and 

 is seven and a half inches in circumference between 

 the second and third tines. 1 Another beautiful pair 

 of horns, to which only a very small piece of the 

 skull is attached, weighs just twenty pounds. These 

 heads would compare favourably with most Caucasian 

 heads, though I believe that it is in the Caucasus 

 that the biggest " maral " horns in existence have been 

 obtained by Russian sportsmen and our own coun- 

 tryman, Mr. St. George Littledale. I am inclined to 

 think that the red deer of Roumelia and Turkey in 

 Europe, as also the large and mighty antlered race 

 found in Galicia and Hungary, are, if not identical 

 with the Cervus maral of Western Asia, at any rate 

 more nearly allied to that species than they are to 

 the smaller and shorter-skulled red deer of the Brit- 

 ish Isles. At any rate, all the skulls I have seen of 

 deer shot in Hungary, Galicia, and Turkey were 

 very long in the face and far more like the skulls 

 of the Asiatic maral than those of red deer from 

 Western Europe. When in condition, a good maral 

 stag will weigh forty stone clean, and exceptional 



1 Quite correct : I measured the above-mentioned heads myself. They 

 are at Constantinople in the possession of Sir W. Whittall and his son. 



