2478 MOSTLY MAMMALS 
lived in an enclosed park without, apparently, any infusion 
of fresh blood. It would, therefore, seem probable that it 
will be less likely to suffer from the effects of inbreeding 
than is the case with animals suddenly transferred from 
the wild state to captivity. Every care is, of course, 
taken of these valuable animals, and naturalists will watch 
with interest the results of the attempt to renew and 
preserve a decadent and almost exterminated race. 
So far as I am aware, Pére David’s mi-lou deer is 
the only example of a mammalian species used neither as 
a food-supply nor as a beast of burden which has been 
preserved from extermination in a semi-domesticated state. 
Readers of this article who may be desirous of seeing 
the mi-lou deer, will find a handsome stag, with fully 
developed antlers, exhibited in the Natural History branch 
of the British Museum, where there is also the mounted 
head of a female—both the gift of the Duke and Duchess 
of Bedford. Unfortunately, the taxidermist to whom the 
task of mounting the stag was confided (and taxidermists 
are the despair of naturalists, whose name they are prone 
to appropriate!) took for his model a red-deer instead of 
photographs like the one here reproduced. Consequently, 
instead of having the slouching, donkey-like carriage so 
essentially characteristic of the species, the Museum 
specimen is represented with its head elevated, after the 
fashion of Landseer’s picture, ‘‘The Monarch of the Glen.” 
As already mentioned, the mi-lou deer, which is the 
sole representative of its kind, has no near relatives in 
the Old World. In spite of a certain not very important 
difference in the structure of the bones of the fore-foot, it 
appears, however, to be a not very distant cousin of the 
typical American deer—that is to say, the numerous species 
other than the elk, the wapiti, and the reindeer, which 
