108 THE DEER OF AMERICA. 
that the size of all animals largely depends on the quantity and 
the quality of the food with which they are supplied. This is 
mouch better established than that the size of antlers is depend- 
ent on the same cause. The question is, why are the larger 
antlers grown on the smaller animal? Is it due to accidental or 
factitious causes or to a specific difference? I perceive no cause 
which could have produced this great development of the antlers, 
which would not also have produced an equal development of the 
whole animal. 
In habits, too, they differ very considerably. The larger spe- 
cies are much less gregarious than the smaller. I do not know, 
however, that I should make very much out of this, for it may 
be accounted for by their greater numbers. The woodland 
caribou are nowhere so abundant as the others, and are seldom 
found in large bands; two or three, or a dozen at most, being 
found together, except in the interior of Newfoundland, where 
their numbers are much greater, and there they are found in 
larger herds than on any part of the continent, as far as I can 
learn, except to the west of Hudson’s Bay, where Richardson 
informs us that large numbers assemble together and move in 
bodies. Cormack, to whom we are indebted for the first reliable 
information of the habits of this deer in the interior of New- 
foundland, tells us that they migrate in search of food in single 
file, in herds of from twenty to two hundred each, and so the 
whole country is cut up in every direction with their paths. We 
have no account that the northern species travel in this order, 
and they assemble in bands of thousands. 
We may, perhaps, attach more weight to the difference in their 
habits of migration. The northern species are strictly migratory, 
traversing in their migrations some ten degrees of latitude or 
more from the Arctic Ocean, south, excepting where confined by 
physical barriers, as in Labrador. The woodland caribou are 
migratory too, but to a less extent, or rather the habit is less uni- 
versal. In Newfoundland, their migrations are necessarily lim- 
ited in extent. On the continent, they are at liberty to go to 
the Arctic Sea, but they stop short of the sixtieth degree of north 
latitude, and probably but a small proportion reach that. The 
migrations of many, if not of a large proportion, are probably 
from one part of some pretty large district adapted to their wants 
to another part, as may be prompted by circumstances, either the 
disturbed condition of the country, or the exigencies of food sup- 
ply. Those living in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick probably 
