232 THE DEER OF AMERICA. 
knowledge, and I trust the time is coming when sportsmen will 
generally adopt this course. In this way, they will double the 
pleasures of the chase, and when they meet in the camp or at the 
club house, to recount their triumphs and compare their observa- 
tions, they will enjoy an intellectual treat, far surpassing the 
story of the simple score or the skillful shot. 
But let us return to the consideration of the spike buck. I re- 
peat, so far as I know, we have no well authenticated, reliable 
observations to justify the conclusion that these spike antlers are 
ever grown upon adult animals. All we have on the subject is a 
sort of general conjecture, founded no doubt upon exceptional 
cases. 
Continued observations upon the young deer in my parks, have 
enlightened me much on this subject. For several years, I really 
persuaded myself that I had the true spike-antlered bucks, and 
set myself to carefully note their peculiarities, and fondly believed 
that I was about to add an important chapter to scientific knowl- 
edge. But these careful and continued observations soon unde- 
ceived and disappointed me. By marking the spike buck of one 
year, which was as large as one feeding by his side, having two 
or three tines on each antler, I found the next year that his ant- 
lers were also branched, and my spike-antlered buck had become 
a fine specimen of the ordinary kind. And then the early fawn 
of the year before, dropped from a fully adult vigorous doe, 
which had furnished him plenty of milk, had now grown to the 
size of a medium adult, and had fine spike antlers, resembling in 
all things his older brother of the preceding year now bearing 
the pronged antlers. And so I anxiously pursued my observa- 
tions for a number of years, ever looking in vain for a second 
antler without prongs. Without this certain means of knowl- 
edge, I should have believed that those large spike-antlered bucks 
were more than yearlings and nearly adult. It is true the den- 
tition might have undeceived me, but this I could not ascertain 
while the animal was alive, and this test has probably been 
rarely examined and carefully studied by those hunters, who 
believe they have killed adult deer, with spike antlers. I feel 
quite sure that they had not the means of accurately determining 
the true ages of the wild deer which they had killed; and what 
I have already stated may serve to show how very liable all are 
to be misled in relation to a point, upon a certain knowledge of 
which the whole question depends. 
I think the evidence satisfactory to establish the fact, that in a 
few instances female Virginia deer have been killed having small 
