286 THE ZOOLOGIST. 



horns play no part in the transaction, the fight throughout par- 

 taking of that character which the battering-ram has rendered 

 famous in the ancient history of nations. Even as a guard to 

 the forehead the horns of the Highland Sheep avail him nothing 

 in a bout with the hornless Leicester; nor do the admired 

 weapons of the Highland Ox secure him from defeat by the 

 polled skull of the more massive Galloway. 



These and the foregoing facts point to but one conclu- 

 sion — that frontal weapons, which were originally protective, 

 have been structurally conditioned by natural selection during 

 their development so as to become protective in the double sense 

 of an adjustment, on the one hand, to preserve a 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. Had it been 

 otherwise, the horned and antlered genera must have been 

 suicidally exterminated in turning against each other the fatal 

 weapons to which, under existing circumstances, they owe their 

 ultimate survival. 



The periodical shedding and renewal of antlers appears to 

 conflict with the theory of their protective origin, and to favour 

 the view which would associate them with the exercise of the 

 sexual function ; but the apparent difficulty is found to rest upon 

 a narrow basis of facts, and disappears as we extend our horizon 

 in space and time, geographically and historically. Frontal 

 weapons, whether permanent or deciduous, and both in the male 

 and the female, bear a more or less intimate relation to the 

 reproductive system ; but there is no reason to assume a special 

 correlation between the shedding of antlers and the exercise of 

 the sexual function, since observation and experiment have con- 

 clusively shown (1) that in the individual Deer this function is 

 exercised independently of the presence or absence of antlers, 

 and (2) that the shedding of antlers does not follow as a conse- 

 quent upon the period of rutting, being subject to indefinite 

 variation in different species. Palaeontological investigation has 

 taught us that the shedding of the velvet, and of the antler, are 

 inherited characters conditioned by the structure of earlier and 

 permanent weapons from which both horns and antlers were 

 aboriginally developed ; and the periods of shedding, among the 

 Beer of Tertiary times, so far as they can be determined from 





