Roe-Stalking and Roe Heads 2,23 
that is to say, showing thin, crooked, and malformed heads ; but why do we never see a wild 
stag with a great solid heavy-mossed head like the two roe figured on p. 222 ? Perhaps the 
answer is that stags, never being fired at with shot-guns, are never injured in exactly the 
manner which would produce this horn-superfluity. 
It is not very rare to see female roe with pedicles and rudimentary antlers, but it is very 
unusual to find the horns fully developed and rubbed clean. Mr. J. E. Harting mentions 
two having occurred in Scotland, but does not state whether the horns were fully developed 
or not. One such example, however, was killed a few years ago at Petworth Park in Sussex, 
and the skull is now in the Royal College of Surgeons. 
I give a picture of a skull with little horns now in Sir Douglas Brooke’s collection at Cole- 
brooke ; it was killed in Morayshire on 7th December 1872, and I have also copied beside 
it the figure of a head in velvet which appeared in Der Weidmann for 10th January 1896. 
This is a good example, and the horns were well developed and perfectly hard when shot on 
17th November 1895 by Mr. Alfred Bourcart at Guten-Brunnen in Germany. The editor 
of that paper considers that this animal was probably a hermaphrodite, but I quite agree with 
Mr. J. E. Harting, who furnished some notes on this head to the Field (8th February 1896), 
that it was only a female exhibiting male attributes in the shape of horns. 
In March 1896 there also appeared an interesting note in the Field by Mr. R. Zeitler, 
writing from Munich, in which, besides recording cases of female roe with horns, he gives 
the following information :— 
It need not be assumed that female roe deer with antlers are either hermaphrodite or barren. On the 
contrary, it has been proved in many cases that does with horns were prolific and dropped fawns. Mr. 
Grashey, who has in the press a work dealing with this subject, shot a doe with horns, which in the rutting 
time came to his call like a buck, and which was consequently mistaken for one. This animal had had a 
fawn and had given suck. 
