72 FOREST CREATURES. 



the process of ramification ; tlie juices, however, which 

 should have furnished the necessary strength for the 

 effort were already expended, and so we see the inten- 

 tion only, and not the accomplishment. 



The like result may be occasioned also by an injury 

 to the horn while in this state of growth, by grazing or 

 striking it against any hard object. Such an accident 

 causes that blunted or deformed appearance which is 

 sometimes seen. The direction which nature would have 

 given the young sprays having been thus forcibly 

 changed, the result is a fantastic formation. And as 

 plants and fruit trees, by stripping off some of their 

 leaves and the least promising buds will bear much 

 larger fruits and flowers, so that other plant-like growth, 

 a stag's antler, will show a more than usual development 

 in one direction, when the transmission of the living sap 

 has been cut off from another. It is, in fact, an ex- 

 emplification of that law which Goethe discovered with 

 regard to the development of plants, and which, doubt- 

 less, he never anticipated would be applied to such a 

 growth as we are treating of here. All the parts of the 

 plant he found to be merely different stages in the de- 

 velopment of the leaf. Here the whole antler seems 

 to be but a modification of the simple spray. And, as 

 by the application of this morphological theory to 

 animal physiology, it has been satisfactorily proved 



