48 AMERICAN GAME. 
with great difficulty and even pain; he is not, however, 
a grazing animal by nature, though he may resort to it 
at times, from whim or for the lack of other means of 
subsistence, but essentially a browser, for which mode of 
feeding he is particularly adapted, being in a lesser~ 
degree of the same structure with the cameleopard, 
although the latter is loftier and far more exaggerated 
in the height of his foreparts, owing to the immense 
altitude of the trees—a species of mimosa—which afford 
his favorite nourishment. Further than this, the huge, 
flexible, prehensile upper lip of the Moose, which he 
uses nearly as an elephant does his trunk, is of great 
service to him in collecting the leaves and tender twigs 
of the birch and alder, which, with the tips of some of 
the evergreens, are his choice dainties. In the summer 
season, when the woods are alive with Pharaoh’s plague 
of flies and musquitoes, which seem to devote themselves 
with particular assiduity to the tormenting this great 
giant of the wilderness, he delights to resort to marshy 
pools‘and lakelets, where he wades out till his head is 
barely above the surface, and lies there wallowing 
deliciously all day long in the pure cold waters, safe 
from his winged persecutors, and browses in security on 
the floating leaves and buds of the water-lilies-and on 
the aquatic grasses which he crops as he swims or wades 
about at his pleasure. 
The horns, for antlers they cannot correctly be called, 
of the male are an enormous and apparently useless 
