258 
SEXUAL SELECTION: MAMMALS. 
Part II. 
doubtful whether they are of any service in their 
battles. With Antilope montana they exist only as 
rudiments in the young male, disappearing as he 
grows old ; and they are absent in the female at 
all ages ; but the females of certain other antelopes 
and deer have been known occasionally to exhibit 
rudiments of these teeth.^^ Stallions have small canine 
teeth, which are either quite absent or rudimentary 
in the mare ; but they do not appear to be used in 
fighting, for stallions bite with their incisors, and do 
not open their mouths widely like camels and guana- 
coes. Whenever the adult male possesses canines now 
in an inefficient state, whilst the female has either none 
or mere rudiments, we may conclude that the early 
male progenitor of the species was provided with effi- 
cient canines, which had been partially transferred to 
the females. The reduction of these teeth in the males 
seems to have followed from some change in their 
manner of fighting, often caused (but not in the case 
of the horse) by the development of new weapons. 
Tusks and horns are manifestly of high importance to 
their possessors, for their development consumes much 
organised matter. A single tusk of the Asiatic ele- 
phant, — one of the extinct woolly species, — and of the 
African elephant, have been known to weigh respectively 
150, 160, and 180 pounds ; and even greater weights 
have been assigned by some authors.^^ With deer, in 
See Kuppell (in ‘Proc. Zoolog. Soc.’ Jan. 12, 1836, p. 3) on the 
canines in deer and antelopes, with a note by Mr. Martin on a female 
American deer. See also Falconer Q Palseont. Memoirs and Notes/ 
vol. i. 1868, p. 576) on canines in an adult female deer. In old males 
of the musk-deer the canines (Pallas, ‘ Spic. Zoolog.’ fasc. xiii. 1779, p. 
18) sometimes grow to the length of three inches, whilst in old females 
a rudiment projects scarcely half an inch above the gums. 
Emerson Tennent, ‘ Ceylon,’ 1859, vol. ii. p. 275 ; Owen, ‘ British 
Fossil Mammals,’ 1846, p. 245, 
