150 ON THE ELK IN NORWAY. [ Feb. 3, 
attribute non-palmation of the horns entirely to imperfect 
development of the animal, caused by insufficient food in their 
earlier years, or degeneration caused by old age, wounds, or other- 
wise. We did not reckon an Elk to be adult until he had at 
least seven points on each horn, and the oldest and largest bull 
that I ever killed, which had been well known in the district, and 
continually hunted for at least ten years, had, when I killed him, 
well-palmated horns of about one-half the size of what they ought 
to have been in an adult animal of his size, showing that in the 
Elk, as in the red deer, the horns degenerate in size and number 
of points in old age, which may be fifteen or twenty years or less. 
Two such instances of degeneration are figured. Text-fig. 24, 
p- 147, is the head of an old Elk killed by Thomas Bate, Hsq., in 
Lurudal Namdalen on Sept. 25, 1890. The horns measure 43 inches 
in expanse, with ten points on one side and eleven on the other ; 
the points are, however, not arranged in a uniform series on the 
edge of the palm, and the development of the brow-antlers is very 
abnormal. 
The shed horns of what was probably the same animal were 
picked up on the same ground in the year previous by Col. Sullivan, 
and are of the same type with the same number of points. 
An Elk displaying still more remarkable abnormal degeneration 
was killed by Capt. Ferrand, and is shown in text-fig. 26, p. 149. 
This animal was supposed to be 25 years old or more, and 
the incidents of his death have been most graphically described in 
the ‘ Badminton Magazine’ for March 1901 by Capt. Ferrand. The 
horns are now in the Ipswich Museum. 
The largest horns I have seen from Norway, belonging to an 
animal which I unsuccessfully hunted for many days, but which 
was afterwards killed by a farmer, and sold to me by Mr. Bruun 
of 'Trondhjem, were 54 inches in width, with nine points on each 
side (see text-fig. 18, p. 134); but there is a pair of shed horns in 
Sir Henry Pottinger’s house at Mo, of one of which I send a tracing 
(see text-fig. 22, p. 142), showing sixteen points on each side. It 
is well known in Norway that the Elk of the southern districts, 
which are much more fully timbered, and where there is nothing 
like the same extent of open fell and good feed as in North 
and South Trondhjem, and where both sexes are much more 
constantly hunted and the calves frequently deprived of their 
mother’s milk in September, do not, in modern times at least, 
produce anything like such fine heads as those of the wilder 
districts of the north, the conditions being probably very similar to 
those deseribed by Dr. Lonnberg as in the southern provinces 
of Sweden’. Taking his nine figures, I should be inclined to say 
that all except 2 and 3 might, if they had come from Siberia, 
have been considered as belonging to Alces bedfordiw ; and form, 
to my mind, ample proof of that being (if the horns belong to 
1 Mr. Percy Godman informs me that a well-known Elk-hunter in South Norway 
considers that on his property Elk have diminished by two-thirds in the last ten 
years, and attributes this decrease to their having eaten and destroyed all the “ leaf- 
trees,” z.e. willow, mountain-ash, and aspen. 
