226 THE DEER OF AMERICA. 
usually at maturity shows three tines, and frequently four, and 
the abnormal growth which develops many points is of more 
frequent occurrence than here. Hence interlocked antlers are 
more frequently met with there than here. We see, then, that 
the popular notion that the age of the deer may be determined 
by the number of prongs on his antlers is a popular error. 
Abnormal Antlers of Common Deer. 
f ought not to close this part of my subject without referring 
to'three fossil antlers in my collection, found in the lower drift in 
the valley of the Fox Kiver, near Ottawa, Illinois. Here has 
been an upheaval which elevated the coal measures, and exposed 
all to the action of the great currents which sweep southward, 
and which carried away everything, down to the St. Peter’s sand- 
stone, except in a few places where, for a few hundred acres, 
the lower vein of coal remains. Over this sometimes a portion 
of the soapstone remains, and in others it is gone. Where these 
fossils were found, about two feet of the soapstone remained in 
place over the coal; the deep furrows on the top of which show 
plainly the glacial action, or rather the plowings of the icebergs, 
which drifted down with the great current and grounded two or 
three miles lower down, where the extent and forms of many may 
now be seen and traced, by the clusters of great bowlders which 
they left when they melted away, as plainly as if marked ona 
map. After this denudation there was deposited a stratum of. 
gravel six inches thick and above that, more than sixteen feet 
first of sand and gravel, then sand, then sand and clay, then clay, 
and lastly, surface loam. In this lowest stratum of gravel, which 
