250 THE ZOOLOGIST. 



quarries of Montmartre (Eocene of France), among the fossil relics 

 of fifty species of quadrupeds, nearly four-fifths of the whole are 

 perissodactyle ungulates, which have left in this enduring monu- 

 ment not only their bones but their footprints side by side with 

 those of their carnivorous destroyers. The use of the head for 

 defence, facing the foe, seems to have endowed ancestral ruminants 

 with protective capabilities, which were turned to decisive account 

 in the development of cranial weapons. Such weapons first appear 

 in the middle Miocene of the Tertiary geological period, bony 

 outgrowths from the frontal region of the skull, simple or pronged, 

 and covered with hairy skin, which marks the point of divergence 

 to the more specialised horns and antlers that succeeded. The 

 hair, in the one case, hardened into horn upon the bony core 

 beneath it (Bovidce) ; the bone, in the other case, stripped of its 

 hairy covering, suffered alternate fracture and renewal till slowly 

 fashioned into a deciduous antler (Cervidce). Weapons of the 

 transition survive in the horns of the Prongbuck, which cast their 

 horny sheath like the velvet of the antler, yet retain the per- 

 manent bony core characteristic of the true horn. The stump- 

 like appendages of the Giraffe, which seem to recall the primitive 

 type of weapon, are not, however, a process of the skull but of 

 independent ossification. When we reflect that the slender horns 

 of the little Indian Blackbuck will give pause to such a relatively 

 formidable opponent as the hunting Leopard, we need not doubt 

 that even the simple weapons of the Miocene sufficed at the 

 outset to inspire the destroying carnivores with a preference for 

 unarmed prey; and that this occurred in fact we have silent, 

 though eloquent, testimony in the complete extinction during this 

 period of whole families of hornless ungulates. The Anoplotheres, 

 a specialised group linking the pair-hoofed with the odd-hoofed 

 section of the order, the tapir-like Palseotheres, the Anthra- 

 cotheres, pig-like and swamp-loving, do not survive the Miocene, 

 and are wiped out of the geological record thereafter. 



Increasing destructive pressure, as carnivores multiplied and 

 herbivores declined, was met, on the part of the artiodactyles, 

 with further protective adjustment in the direction of more 

 powerful weapons, and caused, on the part of the perissodactyles, 

 a further diminution of numbers in the direction of gradual 

 extinction. When we pass to Pliocene times, we find a ruminant 

 fauna carrying frontal weapons absolutely differentiated and 



