178 THE ZOOLOGIST. 
The scent from these glands serves the purpose of enabling an 
animal to join the others of its own species, but also enables 
enemies to follow them; in the Skunk the awful smell given 
off serving as a defence from the latter when attacked. The 
staining of the face in deer, from the secretion of these glands, 
gives the appearance of weeping to the animal, and has been 
suggested as the origin of Shakespeare’s lines on deer weeping, 
occurring in ‘As You Like It’:— 
“The big round tears 
Cours’d one another down his innocent nose 
In piteous chase.” 
And again, in ‘ Hamlet’ :— 
‘‘ Why, let the stricken deer go weep.” 
The accompanying sketch, taken from an Antelope now in the 
Zoological Gardens, shows the situation of the gland at a short 
distance below the eye, and sufficiently near for the tears to run 

over into it. It will be noticed that the animal has the power 
of closing and opening the orifice of the gland by means of 
muscles. The pit is about an inch long and not very deep. It 
is formed by a folding in of the skin, and the secretion from the 
little glands opening into it is tenacious, and has a somewhat 
musky odour. The keeper at the Gardens told me that he had not 
noticed that the secretion was more copious or more odorous at 
one time than another, though Darwin mentions that in some 
deer it smells more during the rutting season. 
