from below against a pad, as we do our bread
from above against wooden trenchers. Goats,
antelopes, camels, giraffes, as well as deer, show
the build which adapts them by raising their
heads high up for browsing upon the leaves and
sprouts of shrubs and trees. Their tongues are
their hands, taking or catching instruments,
serving them as their trunks serve the elephants.
They take their fodder with their tongues, pads,
and cutting teeth, and they chew it with their
grinders or molars while kneeling down upon
the ground, with looks of sleepy satisfaction.
Endowed with four sacks in their stomach,
they shake up the fodder and chew the "cud,"
which means chew the chewed. The stag
shakes up his fodder from his first sack or
stomach, with violent shakes, into his mouth;
but most cud-chewers, or ruminants as they are
called in Latin, get up their leaves or grass with
little difficulty, except when they have eaten
too much. And the tongue of a deer is not so
awkward a hand as might be supposed, for it can
stretch above his eyes.

Cud-chewing is a mark which separates a
group of mammals, including the deer; but it
is not a character special to the deer themselves.
A characteristic of the deer is their falling horns.
The growth of the horns of deer is indeed
one of the wonders of life. Worship, somebody
has said, is the expression of wonder, and many
poets have expressed the wonder mankind have
felt on seeing and considering the horns of
deer. The poet Waller expressed this wonder
in reference to the gigantic Irish deer.
Professor Owen says: "The great extinct Irish
deer surpassed the largest wapiti, or elk, in
size, and much exceeded them in the dimensions
of the antlers. The pair first described and
figured in the Philosophical Transactions
measured ten feet ten inches, in a straight line, from
the extreme tip of the right to that of the left
antler; the length of each antler, from the burr
to the extreme tip, in a straight line, was five
feet two inches, and the breadth of the expanded
part, or palm, was one foot ten and a half inches."
Waller's lines run somewhat into hyperbole at
last; but, on the whole, the astonishment they
embody is as just as it is strong:

    So we some antique hero's strength
    Learn by his lance's weight and length;
    As these vast beams express the beast
    Whose shadowy brows alive they drest.
    Such game, while yet the world was new,
    The mighty Nimrod did pursue.
    What huntsman of our feeble race,
    Or dogs, dare such a monster chase?
    Resembling, at each blow he strikes,
    The charge of a whole troop of pikes.
    O fertile head! which every year
    Could such a crop of wonder bear!
    The teeming earth did never bring
    So soon, so hard, so huge a thing;
    Which, might it never have been cast
    (Each year's growth added to the last),
    These lofty branches had supplied
    The earth's bold son's prodigious pride:
    Heav'n with these engines had been scaled,
    When mountains heaped on mountains failed.

At page 209 of number 185 of this Journal
will be found an essay on Bone-making. A
perusal of it will greatly help the reader in
understanding horn-making, and save me the
task of repeating what was said there in
reference to the periosteum, a perfectly marvellous
membrane which becomes bone in the most
extraordinary circumstances. The growing horn
of the deer is covered with a skin called the
"velvet," and this skin is the covering of the
membrane or periosteum which becomes the
horn.

The falling horns of the deer, have two
contrasted shapes, the round and the flat. The
roebuck, and red deer have round; and the elk
and fallow deer flat horns. At six months old
the male calf of the red deer has already his
"bosets;" during his second year they become
"dags;" and the calf is then called by the
French a "daguet," and by the English a
"brocket." The "spayard" or third year calf
has two or three "tynes" on his dags. At four
years old, the "staggard" is distinguished by
the spreading of the crown of his horn into
branches; and when these amount to five in
the fifth year, he has grown into a "stag."
When six or seven years old, the stag becomes
a "hart" with "tynes," of a very variable number.
The growth of the flat horns of the fallow deer
and reindeer is similar. After being successively
"buckfawn," "pricket," "sorel," and
"sore," in the fallow deer of the fourth year
the antlers become more numerous, and their
stems bifid or cleft. Antlers, or the branches
of the deer's horns, is a name derived from
the preposition of the Latins, ante, before,
or from a common source. Pages might be
filled with quotations from poets expressive
of admiration for antlered deer. Longfellow,
describing the best beloved of the friends of
Hiawatha, says:

     Beautiful and childlike was he,
     Brave as man is, soft as woman,
     Pliant as a wand of willow,
     Stately as a deer with antlers.

Hiawatha waiting for the deer he is hunting is
a beautiful picture.

     Hidden in the alder bushes,
     There he waited till the deer came,
     Till he saw two antlers lifted,
     Saw two eyes look from the thicket,
     Saw two nostrils point to windward,
     And a deer came down the pathway
     Fleck'd with leafy light and shadow.

The growth of bones, teeth, nails, claws, scales,
shells, hairs, spines, feathers, quills, and unfalling
horns, must all be studied and understood
before clear and discriminating notions can be
formed of the growth of antlers, yet I will try
to give my readers a correct, though general,
conception of it. Deer shed their horns after
the extremest cold of whiter is gone, when the
temperature has reached its lowest point, and
turned towards spring and summer warmth,
while the snowdrop is peeping up, the crocus
spreading its yellow bloom, and the violets and