S94« COMMON ROE. 



goat, which, feeding solely on wood, carries 

 wood^ instead of horns. The female, when about 

 to bring forth, retires to the deepest recesses of the 

 forest. In ten or twelve days the fawns acquire 

 strength sufficient to enable them to follow her. 

 When threatened with danger, she hides them in 

 a close thicket, and to preserve them presents her- 

 self to be chased. But, notwithstanding all her care 

 and anxiety, the young are sometimes carried off 

 by men, dogs, or wolves. This is, indeed, the 

 time of their greatest destruction. Of this spe- 

 cies, which is not very numerous, I know^, from 

 experience, that more are destroyed in the month 

 of May than during all the rest of the year. I 

 often live in a part of France where the Roe is 

 greatly esteemed ( Moiithard in Burgundy ). Many 

 fawns are annually brought me alive by men, 

 and others killed by dogs, without reckoning 

 those Avhich are devoured by wolves : and I have 

 observed, during the space of more that twenty - 

 five years, that, as if there was a perfect equili^ 

 brium between the causes of destruction and re- 

 novation, their number is always nearly equal in 

 the same districts. It is not difficult to count 

 them ; for they are no where numerous, and they 



* The Count de BufFon entertained a singular theory, that the 

 horns of the Deer tribe were a kind of reproduction, as it were, of 

 the trees, &c. on which the animals brousedj the nutritious organic 

 moleculae arranging themselves, in some degree, according to their 

 former figure ! ' ! Under the article Stag, in that agreeable writer's 

 natural history, the reader may find this extraordinary notion main- 

 tained at some length. 



