THE ZOOLOGIST 



No. 212.— August, 1894. 



THE ORIGIN AND PURPOSE OF THE HORNS AND 

 ANTLERS OF RUMINANTS. 



By Allan Gordon Cameron. 



(Concluded from p. 252.) 



III. Structure. 



History favours the view that horns and antlers were 

 aboriginally protective weapons, and an examination of their 

 structure reveals the fact that they are protective in a double 

 sense — as an adjustment, on the one hand, to preserve the 

 .species from destruction by external enemies in the struggle for 

 life, and, on the other hand, to save it from self-destruction 

 through sexual combat in the struggles of rivalry for possession. 

 I propose to take these points in order. 



(1). Considered as an adaptation for defence, and notwith- 

 standing diversity of forms due to generic and specific divergence, 

 the frontal weapons of ruminants appear to be fashioned upon 

 one or other of two main types which may be defined from their 

 structural relation to the skull as either vertical and parallel or 

 transverse and crescentic. In the first-named type, which chiefly 

 distinguishes the Antelopes, and attains a characteristic develop- 

 ment in the genera Strepsiceros, Oryx, Hippotragus, the cranial 

 weapons rise vertically from the skull, and whether lyrate, spirally 

 twisted, straight, or recurved, are relatively parallel to one another 

 and to the cranio-facial axis which falls between them. In the 

 last-named type, which chiefly distinguishes the Deer and Oxen, 



ZOOLOGIST, THIRD SERIES, VOL. XVIII. — AUG, 1894. Z 



