š 
1876.] The American Antelope, or Prong Buck. 199 
_ Dr. Canfield, of Monterey, California, who lived in the midst 
of vast flocks of antelope, and had domesticated many of them 
and intelligently studied them, in 1848, in a communication to 
Professor Baird, of the Smithsonian Institution, announced the 
deciduous character of their horns quite circumstantially, and gave 
many interesting facts connected with the animal, but the pro- 
fessor considered the announcement so extraordinary that he did 
hot feel justified in publishing the communication. Five years 
later Mr. Bartlett, superintendent of the gardens of the Zoölog- 
ical Society of London, himself observed the casting of the horns 
of an adult male then in the society’s gardens, and announced the 
fact to the society in a paper which was published in its Trans- 
actions. Since then it has been admitted by naturalists as an 
established fact. 
From the number of these interesting animals which I have 
had and still have in a state of domestication, my opportunities 
for observing them have been good, and I have found it the very 
luxury of study to observe the progress of the growth and the 
casting of these horns, and to investigate the mode of growth ; 
and I am sure the reader will bear with me while I give a brief 
description of the process. 
The horn of the antelope grows on a permanent process of the 
skull which rises upon the supra-orbital arch, so that not an inch 
of space intervenes on the adult between the base of the horn 
and the orb itself. When the male kid is born, a protuberance 
may be felt where the horn is to grow. This grows with the 
kid, and by the time it is six months old, the little horn breaks 
through the skin, presenting asharp, hard point.. This horn per- 
fects its growth from the first to the last of January, when it has. 
attained a length of an inch or less, and is then cast off. The 
next horn is perfected and cast earlier, and so on till full ma-' 
turity is attained, when the horn is thrown off in October, though 
In this strict uniformity must not be expected. j 
On the adult male the horn is about twelve inches long, and 
the core in the specimen now before me is little more than five 
inches long. The horn is laterally compressed. The lower half 
18 about two and one half inches wide and one inch thick, the: 
anterior edge becoming sharper towards the prong. Above the: 
Prong it is much less compressed, assuming more a cylindrical 
form ; still it is somewhat flattened to the end. The prong, which:: 
'S anterior and occurs about midway the length of the horn, is: 
Scarcely more than an abrupt termination of the anterior part of : 
