THE GUN AT HOME AND ABROAD 
September 12. They rub them on any hard substance that comes handy, 
preferring small trees of a certain size, that bend a bit and thrash their 
horns up and down and in and out of the bark both of the branches and the 
main stem. I have often seen them cleaning them on hard peat hags on 
the open moor and even on stones with moss on them. The somewhat 
tough strips of skin round the coronets and inside the points they often 
pick at with their feet, and force off the particles of skin they cannot reach 
by polishing. At first the horns are quite white, but they change to brown 
in a few days, when the superficial mucus dries. By rolling in the “ soil- 
ing ” pools stags make their horns much darker. 
In “ British Deer and their Horns ” and “ The Mammals of Great Britain 
and Ireland,” I have endeavoured to explain at length and give figures of 
the principal British deer heads of past and recent years, so that in 
this work it is only necessary to summarize my former remarks and 
give notes on, and pictures of, a few exceptional heads that have lately 
come under my notice, and were not shown or described in the works 
referred to. 
The antlers of British Red deer may be classified in the following 
manner: 
1. Heads of Pleistocene and recent times, recovered from the earth in 
England, Scotland and Ireland. 
2. Park stags’ heads. 
3. Heads of stags kept under semi -feral conditions. 
4. English wild stags’ heads. 
5. Irish wild stags’ heads. 
6. Scottish wild stags’ heads (a) prior to 1850; (b) since 1850. 
The antlers of ancient British Red deer are often of good beam measure- 
ment, but seldom of great length. Such an example as that found in the 
bed of the River Halladale, with a beam circumference of nine inches 
is, of course, quite abnormal, the best examples generally being of six 
inches and more. An extreme length of 48 inches, such as that 
possessed by the Bakewell specimen, is also quite unusual in British Red 
deer; but would not be very remarkable in a Carpathian or Caucasian 
specimen even of the present day, for in the great Vienna Exhibition of 
1910 I saw several examples from 50 in. to 53 in. in length. Amongst 
Pleistocene Red deer of these islands, English specimens, especially 
those from the North — Lancashire, Westmorland and Northumber- 
land — are generally the longest and heaviest, whilst Scottish specimens 
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