i6 
growth begins about April, and requires ten or twelve weeks 
for its completion. The antler is built up by a deposit of 
animal matter and mineral salts carried by the blood, and is 
almost identical in composition with ordinary bone. 
In all deer except the reindeer and caribou, antlers are 
borne only by the male. 
The wapiti ranged originally all over the United States 
and a large part of Canada; fifty years ago a few were 
found in the mountains of western Virginia and Pennsylva¬ 
nia, but civilization has gradually driven it, like the buffalo 
and the Indian, to a few fastnesses in the far west, where 
they yet make a stand before the final extermination which 
seems inevitably to await them. At the present time they 
are found only in the Rocky Mountains. In the Yellow¬ 
stone National Park, where all animals are protected by 
law, they abound. They are readily kept, living on almost 
any kind of vegetable food, and are hardy and little liable 
to disease. Save in exceptional cases, and during the season 
of rutting, they are tractable and easily managed. 
It is a significant fact, illustrating the great principle of 
inheritance in animals, that the only species of ungulates from 
the western part of the American continent which have yet 
been successfully domesticated east of the region of the great 
plains, are the elk and the buffalo, and in each of these cases 
their progenitors, but a few generations back, ranged nearly, 
if not quite, to the Atlantic coast. 
No. 33.—THE RACCOON TREE. 
A tall honey-locust tree just outside the western entrance 
to the Small Mammal House has been surrounded by a fence 
and converted into a raccoon pen. The best known of these 
distincly American animals is the one common in the eastern 
United States, (Procyon lotor ). They resemble in diet, and 
in many points of structure, the bears, and have been placed 
by some systematists as a sub-family of the group. They are 
generally classed, however, as a separate family, Procyonidce , 
of carnivores. Their range is almost universal through the 
United States, from the latitude of Massachusetts southward. 
They are subject to considerable variation in color—albinos 
being not uncommon. A specimen formerly in the collec¬ 
tion, from Alabama, was of an orange-yellow, shading into a 
