THE ANTLERS. 175 
terference and knocking together of the deers’ antlers when they 
should be harnessed in couples, one horn was relentlessly chopped 
off close to the head.by a native armed with a heavy sword-like 
knife, leaving a red ghastly stump, from which the blood trickled 
in little streams over the animals’ ears.” If he had had the ant- 
lers sawed off instead of chopped off with a heavy knife, I should 
have liked it better and so probably would the deer, for if those 
antlers were as hard as ordinary deer’s antlers, it must have been 
a very difficult as well as a very cruel task to chop them off with 
anything. The deer were perhaps castrated, though imperfectly, 
which would render the antler less dense with a more active 
arterial system than in perfect animals ; but certain it is that the 
antlers were well matured, for our author tells us just before that 
the deer were caught by throwing a lasso over the antlers of the 
deer, which made ‘*tremendous leaps and frantic efforts to es- 
cape,” to have borne which the antlers must have been pretty 
well matured, hard, and strong. This was in November, near the 
Arctic Circle, when on the full bucks, at least, the antlers must 
have been in their prime. However, making every allowance for 
inaccurate observations arising from want of appreciation of the 
importance of what he saw, we may safely conclude, that when 
the strong and pretty well matured antler was severed near the 
head, there was a discharge of blood at least sufficiently copious 
to drop down upon the ears. This is much more than I have 
ever observed. 
But all antlers do not show equal solidity at the time they are 
dropped in the course of nature, and it is very uncommon to find 
one that is quite solid throughout. Usually towards the lower 
end and indeed for the greatest portion of it, and even extending 
into the tines, a part of the interior is more or less porous when 
the internal growth ceases, the antler dies and is thrown off. 
This internal growth is arrested before sufficient earthy matter 
has been deposited to fill up the interstices in the cancellous tissue 
and render the antler solid throughout. The result is that the 
antler, instead of being solid has an open interior of greater or 
less extent, which, however, is braced in every direction by thin 
plates of bone, leaving the antler lighter, more elastic, and per- 
haps as strong as if the solidification had extended thoughout. 
This arrest of the solidifying process, before all the pores had 
been filled up with earthy matter, results from the extreme solidi- 
fication of a thin plate at the lower extremity of the antler, which 
is in actual contact with the pedicel, and through which the in- 
