656 THE DESCENT OF MAN 



he often uses one tusk, always the same, to probe the ground 

 and thus ascertain whether it will bear his weight. The 

 common bull defends the herd with his horns; and the elk 

 in Sweden has been known, according to Lloyd, to strike 

 a wolf dead with a single blow of his great horns. Many 

 similar facts could be given. One of the most curious sec- 

 ondary uses to which the horns of an animal may be occa- 

 sionally put, is that observed by Captain Hutton" with the 

 wild goat {Capra cegagrus) of the Himalayas, and, as it is 

 also said, with the ibex, namely, that when the male acci- 

 dentally falls from a height he bends inward his head, and 

 by alighting on his massive horns breaks the shock. The 

 female cannot thus use her horns, which are smaller, but 

 from her more quiet disposition she does not need this 

 strange kind of shield so much. 



Each male animal uses his weapons in his own peculiar 

 fashion. The common ram makes a charge and butts with 

 such force with the bases of his horns, that I have seen a 

 powerful man knocked over like a child. Goats and certain 

 species of sheep, for instance the Ovis cycloceros of Afghan- 

 istan," rear on their hind legs, and then not only butt, but 

 "make a cut down and a jerk up, with the ribbed front of 

 their cimeter-shaped horn, as with a sabre. When the 

 0. cycloceros attacked a large domestic ram, who was a 

 noted bruiser, he conquered him by the sheer novelty of 

 his mode of fighting, always closing at once with his ad- 

 versary, and catching him across the face and nose with 

 a sharp drawing jerk of the head, and then bounding out 

 of the way before the blow could be returned." In Pem- 

 brokeshire a male goat, the master of a flock which during 

 several generations had run wild, was known to have killed 

 several males in single combat; this goat possessed enor- 

 mous horns, measuring thirty-nine inches in a straight line 



" "Calcutta Journal of Nat. Hist.," vol. ii., 1843, p. 626. 



^^ Mr. Blyth, in "Land and Water," March, 186?, p. 134, on the authority 

 of Capt. Hutton and others. For the wild Pembrokeshire goats see the "Field," 

 1869, p. 150. 



