THE ANTLERS. 225 
number of points, the other is quite sure to have an unusual 
number also. 
In many works on natural history we meet with illustrations 
of antlers showing a regular progression of development from 
the dag antler of the yearling till old age. This is unfortunate, 
for it is misleading. Such uniformity of progressive growths 
does not occur in nature. There is more of it in our wapiti, and 
its near relative the red deer of Europe, than in any other species, 
and next in our Common Deer; but in these it is quite lost after 
the first three antlers, and is very unreliable after the first or dag 
antler. I have more than one hundred and fifty pairs of wapiti 
antlers in my collection, and beside the dag antlers there are not 
two pairs from which I can confidently declare the age of the an- 
imal on which they grew. The same is true of our Common Deer, 
though there is so much uniformity in the growths of the first 
three antlers as to give rise to a strong probability as to the ages 
of the animals which bore them. 
A deer with antlers of many prongs we may be sure is an aged 
animal, but most of the aged animals here have but the two tines 
with the snag near the base, while in Texas they have three or 
more. 
In my collection I have two pairs of antlers from deer killed 
near here as large as any I have ever seen. The largest pair 
has twelve points, and the smaller has twenty-two. Both were 
from very large deer. 
We often meet with abnormal or deformed growth of antlers 
of deer, which may generally be attributed to some hurt during 
their growth. A pair of these in my collection from the Com- 
mon Deer are illustrated on p. 226. If this deformity arose 
from an injury to the pedicels it would have reappeared in some 
form ever after; but if only to the growing antlers subsequent 
antlers would not have been affected. ; 
The first, or dag antler, is usually a spike, but sometimes it is 
bifid. The second usually has the basal snag and one tine, 
though sometimes it has two. The third, with rare exceptions, 
has two tines, and this is the normal condition of the antler 
ever after in this latitude and north of us. Of the hundreds 
which have grown to maturity in my grounds, not more than 
one or two have ever developed the third tine. In the South, 
however, it is quite different. In Texas, particularly, I have 
studied them with much care, and although the deer is much 
smaller than here, I have found the antler much larger, and 
