316 . THE DEER OF AMERICA. 
give the least credence to the stories of the ancients of a hybrid 
from the bull and the mare, which the French called jumar. 
Although they are less unlike each other than the wolf and the 
sheep, still the boundary between them is far too broad to render 
interbreeding in the remotest degree probable. Still less dissim- 
ilar are the Cervide and the Bos, for their digestive and genera- 
tive organs are on the same general plan, but in other respects 
they are so very dissimilar in their organization and economy, 
that we should require the most conclusive proof before we could 
believe that their union could ever prove fertile. The most con- 
spicuous, or at least obvious distinction is, that one has a hollow, 
permanent horn, while that of the other is solid and temporary. 
A much closer alliance, or at least similitude, is found between 
the goat, the sheep, and the antelope, and yet all naturalists have 
agreed in placing them in separate genera; but for all this, I 
know not how to reject the evidence that the sheep and the goat 
have sometimes propagated together, and that their hybrid off- 
spring have proved permanently fertile. How much more read- 
ily, then, may we admit the interbreeding of closely allied species 
— as all the deer certainly are, —and that their hybrids should 
sometimes be capable of reproduction, although the repugnance is 
so great that when unconstrained they do not approach each 
other. The wapiti deer is so much larger than any of the other 
species in my grounds, that I have never conceived the possibility 
of hybridizing them ; and indeed the moose is the only member 
of the family on this continent, with which we might expect no 
great difficulty in an attempt to breed them together, although 
the size of the woodland caribou is not so inferior as to render 
the attempt absolutely unpromising. 
The red deer of Europe (C. elaphus), resembles most our elk 
or wapiti deer, and I state my reasons in another place, for con- 
sidering them if not absolutely identical in species, at least very 
nearly allied, and that probably they have descended from the 
same ancestors. I have been so much interested with the fol- 
lowing account of hybridizing the wapiti and the red deer, —if 
that be the true term, — from “* Land and Water,” that I cannot 
do better than to copy it: — 
“The Prince Pless, who has large possessions in Silesia, has suc- 
ceeded, after repeated trials, in obtaining a cross between the Wapiti 
(Cervus Canadensis), and the common red deer. 
“Tn 1862 the Prince bought fourteen Wapitis from Count Arco, a Ba- 
varian gentleman, who had reared these from four brought from Canada 
