158 British Deer and their Horns 
to the bare statement that all these deer are closely connected by their movements, habits, 
and external and internal characteristics. The typical wild fallow deer of Asia Minor pre¬ 
sents a type of horn-growth exactly similar to our park deer of to-day, only that the horns 
are longer, and the palms narrower, and the whole animal is smaller. 
This is the animal from which our fallow deer is supposed to be descended. Such is 
quite likely to have been the case, but most probably another and finer form was also intro- 
A HEAD IN VELVET 
duced at the same period, or later. The New Forest type are far more like a deteriorated 
form of the other big fallow deer about which we know so little, and which is only now 
found on the Asiatic shores of the Sea of Marmora, where it is now threatened with extinc¬ 
tion. The latter animal is altogether a fine beast, approaching the red deer in size, and shows 
the broken-up type of horn so commonly found in these New Forest fallow bucks. Island 
forms, too, do not improve, so we may assume that our present species is more probably an 
inferior form of some finer animal, such as the Marmora buck or C. mesopotamicus , or a 
hybrid, if it may be so called. 
Mr. Gerald Lascelles has been kind enough to have the best of his heads photographed 
