polyanthuses opening their petals. Spring,
which sends the skylark into the sky to sing,
and wakes the melodies of the tree-lark, and the
newly come chaffinch in the leafless trees, sends
hot arterial blood gushing up into the heads of
the cervine race. A new membrane destined to
be converted into horn develops itself, pushing
away the old horn, and the spayard drops his
dags, the stag and the hart their horns with
antlers. The deer's antlers are more like the
matrices of the horns of the other cud-chewers,
sheep, goats, and oxen, than like the horns
themselves. The base of the deer's horn rests
upon a small frontal knob on either side of the
head, from which it is separated by the "burr,"
a bony circular and serrated projection. When
about to fall off, the bony part of the frontal
tubercle or knob softens all over the place
between it and the horn. A new frontal
protuberance then grows rapidly, which is covered
with a soft hairy skin called the velvet. This is
the growing horn. Full of arterial blood, the
rapidly developing membrane, or soft periosteum,
is in this condition eaten uncooked as a dainty
like an oyster. The beating and throbbing of
the blood in this membrane, as perceived even
by the hand when laid upon it, is something
startling. According to the age of the deer, as
I have already said, the cellular membrane
becomes a dag, or a horn with tynes. When it
has reached its appointed size and shape, the
burr hardens, or ossifies, grasping, enclosing,
and restricting the blood-vessels, where the horn
rests on the head. Then the membrane, by
solid deposits, quickly becomes cartilage, and
the cartilage bone; and the horns and antlers
are complete in autumn, when the stags and
harts need weapons to settle their quarrels, or
defend their does and hinds. For, the autumn
is their love season. The periosteum, with its
blood-vessels, has been converted into horns and
tynes, and the velvet is no longer needed.
Deprived of nourishment, this skin shrivels,
splits, and hangs in strips, which the stags and
harts rub off against trees. The velvet is a
continuation of the skin of the head, the
periosteum a continuation of the membrane which
forms the skull, and the horn is composed of
bony elements.

The rapidity of the growth of such masses of
bony formations has always been a theme of
wonder; for bones grow slowly, and horns
quickly. Ten days push the horns of the wapiti
up several inches; and in five weeks they have
a span of two feet. Antlers weighing sixty or
seventy pounds grow in ten weeks.

The annually falling horns of deer will naturally
recal to mind the analogous characteristics
of birds which moult, and crustaceans and reptiles
which cast their shells and skins every year.
The word horn is equally applied to the weapon
of the ox and the stag, but they are very different
things. A good idea of the difference will
be obtained by supposing the dried up periosteum
inside a quill or feather to have been solidified
into bone.

Respiration is an operation in which black
blood becomes red or dead blood alive, and the
horns of deer develop according as their blood
vivifies. The stag is more reproductively alive
than the brocket, and the hart than the stag. A
Canadian stag developed a miserable little horn
during a voyage from America; but a comparatively
handsome one with five tynes when well
fed in a French menagerie. In the Museum of
the College of Surgeons there is exhibited the
horn of a fallow deer which, in consequence of
a vital mutilation, was hideously deformed in its
growth, and did not fall off at the usual time.
The flat or palmated horn, it is thought, has
been given to the deer of northern climes to
enable them to shovel off the snow from their
fodder of twigs or grass.

Deer are a very well defined group of beasts,
but their classification as species has apparently
hitherto baffled all the makers of systems. The
horns have been tried, but will never do. The
horns of the same individual differ greatly one
year with another. As for the horns of different
individuals of the same species they differ vastly.
Horns seen in museums have always been
selected because they are fine specimens of their
kind; but the horns imported in shiploads for
the use of the cutlers, show how various and
different they may be in individuals of the same
species. It is, indeed, only a weak classification,
which can be based upon the marks peculiar to
the stags and harts without noticing the
characteristics of the does and hinds.

Deer bury their horns. Loch Chabar, the
lake of horns, near Fort William, derives its
name from the number of horns found in the
soft black peat moss of its banks. Recently,
cast horns are frequently found imbedded in
earth. As spiders eat their webs to obtain the
materials of their silk, deer often gnaw their
horns for sulphate of lime to harden their bones
and antlers.

Buffon, who was rather an eloquent writer
than an accurate observer on natural history,
suggests that the horns of deer are in some
sort trees: the moleculæ of the twigs and
leaves on which the stags browse, after nourishing
them, resuming their previous and arboreal
arrangements!

Deer are not the only ruminants which have
what the French call "larmiers," and the
English "tearpits," under their eyes, which,
however, it is now known, shed no tears. The
poets have given expression to this old error.
Shakespeare, in As You Like It, says:

                             The big round tears
     Coursed one another down his innocent nose
     In piteous chase;

and adds, the hairy fool augmented the swift
brook with tears! Thomson, to excite pity for
a stag at bay, says:

     The big round tears run down his dappled face.

Poets are but echoes. The statements which
they make are seldom their own, being generally
only what is popularly believed in their day.
The naturalists were the authors of this error,
and yet it is almost always corrected by modern