STAG, HIND, AND CALF. 115 



moting or retarding the growth of the horns ; and 

 altogether it must be confessed that it is impossible to 

 tell a deer's age accurately by his horns alone. The 

 broad question whether a deer be old or young may 

 often be solved through their means, but by no means 

 invariably or infallibly. Mr. Bisset in the course of 

 his mastership marked and turned out a certain number 

 of male calves taken before the hounds, whereof about 

 one half have since been found and killed ; but in 

 hardly one case do the heads of these deer correspond 

 in number of points to those assigned to deer of their 

 age by Dr. Collyns. A list of these will be found in 

 Appendix C for the satisfaction of the curious ; but as 

 all the deer therein chronicled were over four years 

 old when killed, it may be as well to mention that 

 there is authentic record of a two-year-old male deer 

 with all his rights {i.e. with eight points), and a sus- 

 picion almost amounting to certainty of a yearling 

 with trey and upright. 



Deer shed their horns every year ; in Exmoor 

 between the middle of April and the middle of May, 

 the exact time varying according to the weather and 

 the age of the stag. The old stags are the first to 

 shed their horns, and according to Dr. Collyns rarely 

 carry them later than the end of May ; a two-year-old, 



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