THE LIFE OF MAMMALS 
Europe as an object of the chase or an ornament to the rural 
landscape. To us it is inseparably connected with pictures of 
life in the Scottish Highlands, where tracts of rough hill land, 
called ‘deer forests,” are left vacant mainly to furnish sanctu- 
ary for the herds and sport in deer stalking for the proprietor. 
This manly, exhilarating, and ancient form of the chase is 
celebrated in a fair library of books,*’ and in many a paint- 
ing and piece of sculpture. Wild red deer still also range the 
Devonshire moors, but there they are chased on horseback, 
with hounds, at the proper season, by privileged persons, — 
an imitation of which is the running of a stag practically tame, 
which occurs from time to time at Windsor, near London; and 
when the hounds overtake the animal (which frequently refuses 
to run at all) it is caught by keepers, before they can harm it, 
and carricd home ina cart! In our forefathers’ diys the chase 
of the stag was no such farce, of course; and stag hounds were 
something more than the show dogs to which they have now 
degenerated. In Hungary and South Russia wild deer are got 
by ‘‘driving,”’ with the aid of a circle of beaters. 
A fine specimen of the British red deer will nowadays stand about four 
feet tall at the shoulders (the hinds are much smaller), and in summer 
is bright reddish brown, the head and legs being somewhat grayer, and the 
buttock patch yellowish; the fawns are at first white-spotted. In winter 
the coat is longer and grayer. A fine Scotch stag will weigh nearly 300 
pounds; but a century ago stags were to be obtained weighing 4oo pounds, 
the modern depreciation in size and noticeably in the length and spread 
of the antlers being the result of a continual effort to kill the biggest and 
handsomest stags for the sake of their heads as trophies. The deer of 
the Carpathian and Balkan mountains are uniformly largest, and, with the 
maral, represent the central, ancestral stock of the tribe. 
Asia possesses several closely allied forms of red deer, usually esteemed 
distinct species, but Lydekker?8* questions whether it would not be better 
to consider all as local races. One, the maral, inhabits the Caspian prov- 
inces of Persia; another is the hangul of Chinese Turkestan, Kashmir, 
and the western Himalaya, which figures largely in the hunting stories of 
Kinloch, Macintyre, and other Himalayan sportsmen; a fourth is the still 
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