THE HORNS AND ANTLERS OF RUMINANTS. 289 



The view that frontal weapons were aboriginally developed by 

 both sexes in a majority of ancestral types finds support in the 

 relative facts as presented by the natural history of existing 

 ruminants. Modern zoology sanctions a division of surviving 

 Pecora (true ruminants) into four groups of family rank, — the 

 Deer, the Giraffes, the Pronghorns, and the Cattle, — of which 

 the Giraffes are allied to the Deer, and the Pronghorns to the 

 Cattle ; and females with horns or antlers appear in every group, 

 and in the older sections of the larger groups. To-day a single 

 surviving species represents the Giraffes, which were nevertheless 

 an abundant group in Pliocene times ; as also the Pronghorns, 

 which recall in the structure of their characteristic weapons a 

 Miocene transitional and primitive type. Of Bovine genera with 

 females bearing horns three-fourths are Antelopes, the oldest 

 group in geological time; while Rangifer, the single Cervine 

 genus with antlered females, is linked to the elder group of Deer 

 not only by the telemetacarpal manus, but in the form of the 

 vomer posteriorly prolonged by ossification. Interpreted phylo- 

 genetically, the embryological facts, adduced by Darwin to confirm 

 his theory of "inheritance as limited by sex," point in the same 

 direction, and favour the belief that the possession of protective 

 weapons by both sexes was a primitive character. Investigation 

 of a number of cases showed that frontal weapons, when present 

 in both sexes, were usually developed at an earlier age than when 

 present in the males only ; a crucial instance being afforded by 

 the Reindeer, in which the antlers appear "at a most unusually 

 early age, and at the same time in both sexes." It must be 

 remembered, however, that ancestral Pecora, representing Deer 

 and Antelopes in the Lower Miocene, exhibit no trace of cranial 

 weapons in either sex; and, in the gradual differentiation of 

 genera and species, the tendency to reversion, which is potent 

 even in males, would combine with the maternal function in 

 females to modify their cranial weapons, whether towards inferior 

 calibre, or retrogression, or disappearance, just as we find to occur 

 in fact. For, associated with males which are normally horned or 

 antlered, we have horned and hornless strains of females, not only 

 among genera constituting families, as with Cervidce and Bovida, 

 but also among species constituting genera, as with the Sheep or 

 the Gazelles, and even among individuals constituting species, as 

 with the Situtunga Antelope (Tragelaphus Spekii), the females of 



