90 Field and Forest Rambles. 



able as being produced at a very early age, which, coupled 

 with their full development in the female, is supposed by Mr. 

 Darwin "to be due to the males having first acquired them as 

 weapons for fighting with other males ; and, secondly, to their 

 development for some unknown cause at an unusually early 

 age in the males, and their consequent transmission to both 

 sexes."* At all events, the predisposition in certain female 

 mammals and birds to assume male characters is always inte- 

 resting and instructive. 



The moose is decreasing steadily ; indeed, considering the 

 wholesale destruction practised by settlers and Indians, it is 

 remarkable how any survive. But this most unsportsman- 

 like and savage custom is not altogether confined to them, for 

 I regret to say not a few English gentlemen, who would affect 

 to hold it a disgrace to shoot a partridge in the breeding 

 season, yet in defiance of laws, and regardless of the time- 

 honoured principles which every right-minded hunter — and 

 let us say, every right-feeling man — respects, do also repair 

 to the forest on exactly the same errand, or, in other words, 

 to blow out the brains of this noble elk as it flounders, heavy in 

 calf, through the hard-frozen snow, its fetlocks often streaming 

 with gore, as now sinking shoulder deep, then with all but super- 

 natural exertions it vainly struggles to escape from its pursuers 

 and the dogs, which are tearing the brute to pieces. It is a sick- 

 ening sight indeed to see an animal which in a few weeks would 

 tax the best energies of the hunter, now from force of circum- 

 stances compelled to be shot like a dog, or knocked down 

 with the woodman's axe in its native forests. We might, how- 

 ever, speculate as geologists on a similar method of exter- 

 minating the Irish and American fossil elks during post- 

 glacial epochs, provided these animals and man existed under 

 conditions similar to those which obtain in the case of the 

 moose during the spring months.f 



* " Descent of Man," vol. ii., p. 245 (1st edition). 



f Some idea of the massacres practised in New Brunswick may be con- 



