NOV 19 1898 1-70

16D298 F

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COLUMBIA

HUMBOLDT LIBRARY

OF

POPULAR SCIENCE LITERATURE.

No. 33. VOL. II.] NEW YORK: J. FITZGERALD & CO. [FIFTEEN CENTS.

These little essays have no pretension to be any more than popular expositions of current evolutionary thought, occasionally their author's, oftener still other people's; but they may perhaps do a little good in spreading more widely a knowledge of those great biological and cosmical doctrines which are now revolutionizing the European mind, and which owe their origin to the epoch-making works of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer. G. A.

I

FALLOW DEER.

very near the great house itself, where children and visitors have long been wont to pet and caress them. There UNDER the great horse-chestnut trees are, indeed, few more interesting relin Woolney Park the broad circle of ics of the past in England than these shade is now pleasant enough to at- stray herds of dumb creatures, remtract the does and fawns of the fallow nants of the native woodland tribes deer, who lie in pretty groups upon which once spread over the whole the grass, or stray about, browsing, well-timbered country, and which beneath the heavy boughs thick with scented blossom. To-day I have brought out a few scraps of bread in my pocket, and the fawns are tame enough to come and eat it from my hand on the open; for they have less fear of man here than in any other place I know of, except perhaps in the Magdalen grounds at Oxford. They will even allow a favorite acquaintance to stroke and fondle their pretty heads. No doubt the long domestication of their ancestors has made them naturally prone to strike up a friendship with human companions, just as is the case with kittens and puppies; and at Woolney they have always lived

now carry us back in mind past the days of Robin Hood and of William the Red to the old forestine life of the Celtic and Euskarian aborigines. For though some good authorities will have it that the fallow deer date back no earlier in this country than the days of the Romans, who are said to have introduced them for their pleasure grounds, I myself can hardly doubt that they are a part of our old indigenous fauna, which now survives only in a few enclosed preserves. The wild white cattle at Chillingham, the red deer on the Scotch moors, and these pretty does and fawns in Woolney Park, all trace back their ancestry,

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VIGNETTES FROM NATURE.

I believe, to the time when England The very earliest ruminants whose was clad by one: almost unbroken remains we meet with in the lower sheet of oaks and beeches, and still tertiary strata were all hornless. earlier to the time when a great belt The resembled in this respect a few of land connected it with the Conti- abnormal living kinds, such as the nent from Holland to Portugal. Even camels, the llamas, and the alpacas, the veriest Red Radical like myself though, of course, these kinds are may well share John Mill's hope that far more specialized in other ways the spread of agriculture and political than were their primitive ruminant economy may never succeed in im- ancestors. But as time went on, the proving these dear dumb friends and wager of battle among the males, pensioners of ours off the face of the common to so many races of mamearth. They are one of the beautiful mals, produced singular results upon iinks which bind us to the præ-human the whole ruminating tribe. The napast; and I hope we may hand them ture of their food prevented them for on as part of our common heritage the most part from fighting with to those who will follow us hereafter their teeth, like carnivores, so they in a higher and more human future.

Evolutionism, it often seems to me, throws a wonderful charm of this half historical sort around every beast or bird or plant in the meadows about

us.

These fallow deer are no longer mere accidental animals happening to live in the park here at the present day: they are creatures with a whole past history of their own, as interesting to the eye of the evolutionist as a castle or an earthwork to the eye of an archæologist, and as a cathedral or a temple to the eye of Mr. Freeman or Mr. Fergusson. We have all been living all our lives in the midst of a veritable prehistoric Ilium, will all its successive deposits and precious relics lying loose about us, and we needed only a Schliemann to tell us what it all meant. Mr. Darwin and Mr. Herbert Spencer have read the riddle for us, and in doing so they have given us a key which will help us to unlock, each for himself, a thousand little secrets of nature that meet us every day, on our way through the world, at every turn. These fallow deer, for example, have a quite recoverable pedigree, which shows us just by what steps they have been developed from an early common ruminating ancestor; and this pedigree M. Gaudry has worked out for us in detail as admirably as Professor Huxley has worked out the genealogy of the horse, and as Dr. Mivart has worked out that of the cat.

took to butting with their heads instead. Thus, either by accidental variations, as Mr. Darwin thinks, or by use and wont, as Mr. Herbert Spencer rather believes (with more probability, as it seems to my humble judgment), aided in any case by natural selection, almost all the ruminants grew at last to have horns or antlers of one kind or another. But these weapons of rivalry-for they are all but useless against other speciesdiffer greatly in their structure, and therefore in their origin, between race and race. All that is constant is the presence of some kind of offensive butting instrument upon the forehead. In the bison and ox tribe, including the antelopes and goats, the weapons take the form of real horns-that is to say, of hollow permanent dermal processes; in the deer tribe, they appear as antlersthat is to say, as deciduous bony, not horny, structures; and in the giraffe they exist in the shape of permanent bosses of the skull, covered with hair and skin, but used very fiercely in combat, even in Regent's Park, where one giraffe once actually drove his horn clean into the skull of another. Only one very abnormal ruminant, the musk deer (which is not really a deer at all, but a specialized aberrant descendant of the old undifferentiated ancestral type), has weapons of a different character-a pair of curved tusks in the upper jaw, used in the

same way as those of the wild boar. |ing reindeer. Indeed, one late tertiary The historical development of ant- species had a pair of wonderfully inlers in the deer tribe is very marked. tricate antlers which far surpassed in While the group was still young and complexity those of any living elk; dominant, with the open grass-clad but, like many other highly specialtertiary plains all before it, and with ized creatures, this over-developed plenty of elbow room to spread and type seems to have fallen a prey to multiply, it had as yet no weapons of the great extinct carnivores of the offense of any kind. But as the races same period. Before the advent of grew thicker and more numerous, man, many such high types existed, and as space failed the younger gen- and they may perhaps have been erations for deer, like men, are sub- partly destroyed by his monopolizing ject to the inexorable logic of the all the most open and desirable plains Malthusians-the fathers of the herd as his special hunting grounds. For began to fight among themselves for we now know that man is certainly a the possession of the does, and only the quaternary, and probably a tertiary strongest survived to become the pa- genus as well; and, even in his lowest rents of future deerkind. Butting and humblest form, his intelligence naturally produces hard bosses or must have made him from the very protuberances of some sort; and in first a dominant race and the real lord the ancestral deer these protuberances of creation. took the shape of bony projections on the forehead. Again, those deer which had the most marked and most pointed projections would best van quish their rivals, and so fare best in the struggle for the hinds. Their descendants would inherit their pecu liarities with more or less variation; and would similarly be selected by the law of battle in accordance with their fighting powers and the fitness of their

weapons.

It is interesting to note, too, that the historical evolution of antlers in the deer tribe is exactly paralleled by the modern evolution of antlers in every individual red deer. In the first year a stag has no horns at all, and is technically known as a calf. In his second year he puts forth a pair of rounded bosses, and is therefore called a knobber in the slang of the gillies. With his third year the knobs. fall off, and are replaced by longer Now this probability, set forth à horns, called dags, while the stag priori by Mr. Darwin, exactly tallies himself is now known as a brocket. with the geological record, as inter- Thus, year after year, the growing preted by M. Gaudry and Professor deer reproduces one stage after anBoyd Dawkins. The very vague and other of the ancestral development, till unspecialized deer of the lower mio- at length the top of the horn expands cene period had no antlers at all; into a broad crown, and the beast is they were somewhat like musk-deer then finally dubbed a hart or "stag of without the tusks, or like young fawns ten," from the number of tines on each in their first summer. But in the of his antlers. It would be quite possimid-miccone, antlers make their first ble to pair the cast horns of each year appearance as mere short pointed tolerably exactly with corresponding knobs; next, they develop a single adult horns from the successive terside tine; and in the upper miocene tiary strata. Every deer in fact they come out as fully evolved as in recapitulates in his own person the our modern species. Every interme- whole evolution of his race, the antler diate stage can be traced between the of each successive year being differmere nascent boss like that of a bud- ent, not only in size, but in form and ding roe in our own day, and the arrangement as well, from those of many-branched headpiece of the exist-all previous seasons.