492 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
[Sept. 24, 1910. 
grows porous on the surface and begins to split. 
The longer it is exposed, the more the animal 
matter leaves it, until at last it splits into frag¬ 
ments, breaks into small pieces and becomes a 
part of the soil. 
It is not only by this slow process of rotting 
and weathering, however, that antlers are de¬ 
stroyed. As said by Mr. Shiras and as has long 
been well known, the rodents or gnawing ani¬ 
mals so abundant in all countries like to try 
their teeth on horns that they find lying on the 
ground. Mice, porcupines, woodchucks and per¬ 
haps other animals do this, but just why they do 
it perhaps no one knows. It may be for some¬ 
thing found in the horn which they like to eat, 
or perhaps they do it for the mere purpose of 
grinding down and sharpening their incisor teeth. 
One sometimes may stand in front of a cage 
which holds a beaver or a woodchuck and see 
him gnaw continually—until the observer’s 
patience is worn out—on the iron or wire which 
forms the front of the cage. 
The front teeth of these gnawing animals— 
known as the incisor teeth—grow from persistent 
pulps. They have no roots, but continue to grow 
through life, a provision which is necessary 
enough, since because the teeth are constantly 
being used on hard substances they wear down 
very rapidly, and if it were not for this con¬ 
tinual growth, they would soon be worn away 
and become useless, and the animal would be no 
longer able to procure its food. The teeth wear 
against each other and keep each other sharp. 
The back part of the tooth—the side directed 
toward the animal’s mouth—is formed of den¬ 
tine, a bone-like material, which is softer than 
the front part of the tooth, which is coated with 
enamel. The soft dentine, wearing down faster 
than the hard enamel, keeps the teeth constantly 
sharp with keen chisel-like edges. An illustra¬ 
tion of the growth of these teeth from persistent 
pulps, which is often given in the books, tells 
of an occasional case where a rodent has by 
accident lost one of its incisor teeth. The oppos¬ 
ing tooth not receiving any wear, and not being 
worn down, keeps on growing, curls about with¬ 
in the mouth, and perhaps penetrates the flesh 
or skull of the owner. 
For whatever reason they do it, it is certain 
that mice, woodchucks, porcupines, beaver or 
other rodents like to gnaw horns. Mr. Shiras 
has told us how he was obliged to keep a man 
on guard in camp to keep the red squirrels from 
gnawing his moose horns’ tips. Years ago we 
had in this office a nodule of moose horn as big 
as a hen’s egg which was all that was left of a 
great moose antler that the porcupines had been 
working at. A figure of a weathered deer skull 
from which one horn has been gnawed off and 
in which the other has been cut down in some 
places to the thinness of paper is here shown. 
Many years ago there was picked up on Goat 
Mountain, in what is now the Glacier National 
Park, a good sized mountain sheep’s horn bear¬ 
ing the marks of many teeth, most of them the 
teeth of large rodents, either porcupines or 
mountain marmots—whistlers. 
On the prairies we have never happened to see 
horns that had been gnawed. Antelope horns 
and buffalo horns usually lie out in the weather 
year after year, until they split and crack and 
gradually become smaller and smaller, until at 
last they disappear. Antelope horns are ex¬ 
tremely perishable, and years ago we wrote of 
having ' placed a pair of antelope horn sheaths 
in a particular spot one summer and visited them 
each year when we returned to the locality. The 
first year after they had been put out they showed 
some signs of cracking; the second year they 
were badly split and curled, while on the third 
visit, a year later, nothing could be seen of them 
except a few hair-like splinters of blackish brown 
horn.” 
All this is wed known, -and yet as the years 
go by and the opportunities for seeing the wild 
creatures of the fields and woods grow less in 
proportion to our population, there is growing 
up a constantly increasing number of men and 
women whose attention has never been called 
to these matters. 
A New Alaska Bear. 
In the proceedings of the Biological Society 
of Washington, issued Sept. 2, Dr. C. Hart Mer- 
riam describes a new bear from Montague Isl¬ 
and, Alaska. The species, which is large and in 
many respects remarkable, is represented by five 
specimens of both sexes and different ages ob¬ 
tained in May, 1905, by Chas. Sheldon, of New 
York, and by three additional specimens taken in 
1908 by Miss Annie M. Alexander. 
Montague Island is in the western part of the 
mouth of Prince Williams Sound in latitude 60 
degrees and only about twenty miles distant from 
•the east shore of the Kenai Peninsula. It has 
long been famous for its bears, which on that 
is’and—as on some other Alaska islands—were 
reputed to be very ferocious. This new bear, 
which Dr. Merriam has named in honor of its 
discoverer. Urstis shcldfini, proves, as mieht be 
expected from its locality, to be related to Ursus 
kenaiensis, which inhabits the Kenai Peninsula. 
The bear is large, the claws of the adult are 
long and of the grizzly type; the long hairs over 
the shoulders tend to form a small but a dis¬ 
tinct hump; the ears are dark with whitish tips, 
the general color brownish, varying from pale 
to dark. The hairs of the back are sometimes 
yellowish tipped, and the belly, legs and feet are 
dark, almost blackish An old c he bear and her 
cub. about sixteen months old, killed May 18. 
1905, were very pale grizzled gray above' and 
only slightly darker below. There are many in¬ 
teresting and characteristic skull and tooth char¬ 
acters. One of the premolars is distinctly like 
that of the grizzly. 
The Box Turtles Brood. 
To country dwellers the box turtle or woods 
tortoise is one of the most familiar of animals, 
and most small boys raised on a farm have de¬ 
voted their time to carving initials and dates on 
the shells of these patient creatures. Some years 
ago we found in a little piece of woods a box 
tortoise which bore the initials of an old neigh¬ 
bor and a date thirty-six years before. The 
land where this turtle was found had belonged 
to the father of the man whose initials were 
carved on the shell, and who was elderly when 
we found the tortoise. 
Little is known about the length of time re¬ 
quired for the hatching of the eggs of the box 
tortoise. Tt deposits them in dry sand or soil, 
but how long the period of incubation is has not 
been very clearly determined. A recent obser¬ 
vation by W. W. Cooke tells of a case where 
its eggs were deposited by a box turtle June 16. 
1908. They were placed on the south side of a 
high, dry knoll at Viresco, Va. The eggs had 
not hatched Aug. 23, but on Aug. 26 the young 
had dug their way to the surface and left be¬ 
hind them the fragments of the shells. The 
period of incubation for these 'eggs was there¬ 
fore between - seventy and seventy-two days. 
After Wild Animal Pictures. 
Hon. Geo. Shiras, 3m whose interesting ac¬ 
counts of his successive visits to the Upper 
Yellowstone River, with the discoveries there of 
abundant moose, have been printed in Forest and 
Stream, started about Sept. 1 for the South Arm 
of Yellowstone Lake. He went in an eighteen- 
foot launch, carrying a canvas canoe, and in¬ 
tended to be gone about twenty days. His chief 
object was to photograph wild animals and birds, 
yet he may have some trouble, as the country 
south of the lake has been burning, and there is 
much fire and smoke there. It is hoped that this 
fire will not reach the moose country on the 
Upper Yellowstone, recently discovered by Mr. 
Shiras, or burn off their winter range. 
Dwarf Elephants in Uganda? 
Capt. C. Graham, of the Fourth King's Afri¬ 
can Rifles, reports from LTganda a herd of dwarf 
elephants which to him seem to differ remark¬ 
ably from the ordinary elephants of Africa. They 
are notable for their small tusks—those of an old 
well grown bull weighing only sixteen pounds 
apiece. The animals are notable for their small 
size, and especially- for their small feet and very 
tiny head. Unfortunately no measurements are 
given, but now that the existence of these ani¬ 
mals has been reported, specimens will undoubt¬ 
edly be measured and brought in. 
New Publications. 
Flying Machines, Construction and Opera¬ 
tion, by W. J. Jackman and Thomas H. 
Russell, with an introductory chapter by 
Octave Chanute. Flexible leather, 221 pages, 
illustrated, $1.50. Chicago, the Charles C. 
Thompson Company. 
Although intended as an aid to the beginner 
at aviation, this is an exceedingly useful book to 
the layman who merely evinces the ordinary 
amount of interest in this new sport. The text 
is not so technical but that any reader can fol¬ 
low it readily, and thus understand the methods 
adopted by the famous bird men who have 
thrilled the world with their remarkable flights. 
All of the principles involved are explained in 
the plainest way, and illustrations given that a 
child can understand. We all read in our daily 
papers of the long or high flights accomplished, 
and these seem very wonderful, but in watching 
an aeroplane in flight we do not see the few 
simple and as yet crude devices by means of 
which the big box kite is made to rise or de- 
sqend, and few of us know of the patient efforts 
ma’de year after year by the pioneers, and of the 
discouraging, often fatal, mistakes made before 
men mastered the art of gliding, then of flying. 
All this and much more is given in this book, 
which is in fact a manual that is needed, in view' 
of the statement of the authors. They claim that 
to-day the actual sales of flying machines out¬ 
number the actual sales of motor cars in the first 
year of their commercial development. 
