3 S 4 
UNGULATES. 
deer is the Chinese water-deer (Hydropotes inermis), which in both these features 
resembles the musk-deer, although in other respects it is allied to the more typical 
representatives of the pre¬ 
sent section of the family. 
The Chinese water-deer 
is of the approximate 
dimensions of the Indian 
muntjac (p. 366); and is a 
long; - bodied and short- 
limbed creature, with light 
reddish-brown fur. One of 
the most remarkable peculi- 
SKULL OF THE CHINESE WATER-DEER WITH PART OF THE UPPER JAW CUT ai’itieS about this Small deer 
AWAY TO SHOW the base OF the tusk. (From Sir V. Brooke, jg the does produce from 
Proc. Zool. Soc., 1872.) . ... . . . .. 
three to six fawns at a birth. 
The pelage of the young is faintly marked with white spots, arranged in ill-defined 
rows. The number of young produced, coupled with the absence of antlers in the 
bucks, indicates that the Chinese water-deer is in all probability a survivor from 
a very ancient type of the Deer family. These deer are commonly found on the 
Yang-tse-Kiang, in parties of two or three. When disturbed, they arch their backs 
and scud away at a great pace in a series of quick leaps. They are usually killed 
with buckshot. 
The resemblance of the skull of the male water-deer to that of the musk-deer, 
is merely due to both forms being apparently direct descendants of the common 
ancestral type, from which the more specialised members of the family have 
been evolved; it being well ascertained that in most or all of the early Tertiary 
deer the males were devoid of antlers and furnished with long upper tusks. 
When antlers were developed to their full extent, so as to become efficient weapons 
of defence, the need for tusks disappeared, and the tusks consequently dwindled 
or were lost. The muntjacs, in which the antlers are short, present a kind of 
middle stage of evolution, the tusks having become much smaller than in the 
Chinese water-deer, though larger than in many species of superior size. 
The American Deer. 
Genus Cariacus. 
With the exception of the wapiti, the reindeer, and the elk, which are either closely 
allied to, or identical with, Old World types, the whole of the deer of America differ 
essential^ from those of Asia and Europe, and are referred (with the exception of one 
small species which forms a genus by itself) to a totally distinct genus, Cariacus. 
These deer resemble the reindeer in the structure of the bones of the lower 
part of the fore-limb; and also in that in the dry skull the aperture of the nasal 
passage is completely divided by a longitudinal vertical partition of bone. The 
latter feature is, indeed, peculiar to the reindeer and the American deer, and serves 
at once to distinguish their skulls from those of any species of the genus Cervus. 
