4 Deer and Antelope of North America 



invented names for ourselves, we applied them 

 loosely. The ordinary deer is sometimes known 

 as the red deer, sometimes as the Virginia deer, 

 and sometimes as the whitetail deer, — the last 

 being by far the best and most distinctive term. 

 In the present condition of zoological research 

 it is not possible to state accurately how many 

 "species" of deer there are in North America, 

 both because mammalogists have not at hand a 

 sufficient amount of material in the way of large 

 series of specimens from different localities, and 

 because they are not agreed among themselves as 

 to the value of " species," or indeed as to exactly 

 what is denoted by the term. Of course, if we 

 had a complete series of specimens of extinct and 

 fossil deer before us, there would be an absolutely 

 perfect intergradation among all the existing forms 

 through their long-vanished ancestral types; for 

 the existing gaps have been created by the ex- 

 tinction and transformation of these former types. 

 Where the gap is very broad and well marked 

 no difficulty exists in using terms which shall ex- 

 press the difference. Thus the gap separating the 

 moose, the caribou, and the wapiti from one an- 

 other, and from the smaller American deer, is so 

 wide, and there is so complete a lack of transi- 

 tional forms, that the differences among them are 

 expressed by naturalists by the use of different 

 generic terms. The gap between the whitetail 



