166 
British Deer and their Horns 
with roe. Certainly fallow deer both can and do take more care of their horns when in the 
velvet; their trophies are not so much in the way as with the noble stag, and they do not go 
dashing through timber or running up against wire fences like roe, so that one may see 
thousands of heads without the slightest abnormality. 
Here is a picture of a three-horned fallow buck from Sir Robert Harvey’s park near 
Slough, and I shot a buck in Mr. Lucas’s park this autumn (1896) which had both a long 
snag going out and backwards by the brow point, and had also another point sticking right 
out of the centre of the palm on the left horn. 
In the museum of the Marischal College, Aberdeen, there is the dropped horn of 
a buck with two perfectly formed brow points, which I think is a great rarity. 
I have never seen a fallow doe with horns. In Boughton, the Duke of Buccleuch’s 
place near Kettering, Northamptonshire, there are preserved the heads of two bucks that 
1. Cast horn with double brows, Marischal College, Aberdeen. 2. Castle Caldwell head, Sir E. Loder’s collection. 3. Head with horn excrescence over the 
left brow and extra point in the palm, author’s collection. 4. Curious horn of a hevier, Dalkeith Park, N.B. 
had become interlocked and had thus died. This is also extremely rare, on account of 
the regular formation of the antlers. Mr. Harting tells me he once came across a couple 
of bucks thus entangled, and it was not until the horns were sawn off by the keeper that 
the deer could be released. 
We all know the curious effects of castration on horn-growth, particularly if the 
operation is only partially effected. Mr. Chonler, the head keeper at Dalkeith, tells me 
that a hevier in that park grew a single horn 35^ inches long, but it always remained 
soft. It was round, similar to a stag’s, with five points. Another threw out a solid 
horn which cleaned, with points springing in the most curious manner from both sides. 
I give a sketch of it on this page. 
If a buck is cut when his horns are off, he is said never to renew them, but I am not 
quite sure whether this is always the case. If he is operated upon when the horns are 
on, he will not shed them as a rule, but there is sometimes a tendency for a growth to 
come from the pedicle at the commencement of the next horn-growing season. I 
have made inquiries as to the effect of cutting a buck when the horns are in the velvet, 
but apparently in some cases the velvet is never shed, and the blood goes on distributing 
