GILPIN — ON THE MAMMALIA OF NOVA SCOTIA. 61 



marksmen are good for running shots, at four and five hundred 

 yards ; yet considering the cold, and the position covered by snow, 

 the firing was rapid. 



As the question now stands, Nova Scotia has a deer identical 

 with that of Newfoundland, Labrador, and what may be called the 

 southern limits of the polar circle, but larger than all. Lapland 

 and the north of Asia also possess a deer, supposed, but not iden- 

 tified, as the same species, both smaller than ours. Reindeer, cari- 

 boo, and woodland cariboo, are their local names. In addition to 

 tliis, the extreme north possesses a deer smaller than any of those, 

 with much larger horns, and with no gall bladder, otherwise the 

 same. Sir John Richardson calls them a permanent variety, naming 

 them Barren Ground cariboo. The absence of the gall bladder 

 seems a very great divergence ; yet crm any one tell me has our own 

 caxuboo one? The horse we know has none. Finally, bones found 

 on the upper tertiary of this ancient deer, and also in ages long 

 subsequent, in the kitchen middens of the pre-historic man of the 

 old world, as well as in our own of more modern date, undoubt- 

 edly prove him to have lived side by side with forms that have for- 

 ever perished ; again to have been the food of man of the stone age, 

 who crushed his bones and tore his bloody flesh with their rude 

 axes, where now their polished descendants carve in silver and steel, 

 and which pushed backwards to the snows and lichens of the Poles, 

 afltbrds still the same rude banquet to the man of stone of the 

 nineteenth century. Most enduring form, most ancient type of all 

 deer extant, this broad-spreading, hair-cushioned foot, with its cut- 

 ting edge, hovv^ many forms has it survived, how many new forms 

 born of itself; of satin-skinned deer, vrith pointed toe ; or African 

 sun-dried deer, with hoof a nut-shell — has it seen. 



