s 



Introductory 



being any important supply of blood from the skull to the core of the 

 antler ; and the description or antlers as dead bone seems therefore justified. 

 On the other hand, I have seen recently sawn fallow deer antlers which 

 bled freely from the interior. 



When the antlers are freed from the velvet — a process usually assisted 

 by the animal rubbing them against tree-stems or boughs — they have a 

 more or less rugose surface, owing to the grooves formed in them by the 

 nutrient blood-vessels. Although a few living species have the antlers in 

 the form of simple spikes in the adult male, in the great majority of species 

 they are more or less branched ; while in some, like the elk and fallow 

 deer, thev expand into broad palmated plates, with tines, or snags, on one 

 or both margins. In the antlers of the red deer group, which form the 

 tvpe of the whole series, the following names have been applied to their 

 different component parts and branches. The main shaft is termed the 

 beam ; the first or lowest tine the brow-tine ; the second the bez-tine ; the 

 third the trez-tine, or royal ; and the branched portion forming the summit 

 the crown, or surroyals. But the antlers of all deer by no means conform 

 to this type ; and in certain groups other names have to be adopted for the 

 branches. 



As already said, the antlers of young deer are in the form of simple 

 spikes ; and this form is retained in the South American brockets, although, 

 as shown later on, the simple antlers of these deer appear due to degenera- 

 tion, and are not primitive types. Indeed, no living deer shows such 

 primitive spike-like antlers in the adult, and it is doubtful whether such a 

 type is displayed by any known extinct form, although many have a simple 

 fork. And, on the whole, there is a regular evolution of complexity in the 

 antlers of the deer as they are traced upwards from the middle portion of the 

 Tertiary period towards the present and immediately antecedent epochs. 

 In the deer of the sambar group, where the antlers never advance beyond 

 a three-tined type, the shedding is frequently, if not invariably, very 

 irregular ; but in the majority at least of the species with complex antlers 

 the replacement is annual, the new appendages attaining their full develop- 

 ment immediately before the pairing-season. In such species there is a 

 more or less regular annual increase in the complexity of the antlers up to a 

 certain period of life, after which they begin to degenerate, or "go back." 

 Of four well-fed red deer kept in captivity at Blair-Athole, the following 



