that we are much in the dark as to
its minute resemblances, but its glandular system is certainly
suggestive of the chamois, and many of its attitudes are strikingly
similar. In all the points in which it approaches goats it is like some,
at least, among antelopes, while in the elongated spines of the anterior
dorsal vertebrae, which support the hump, and in extreme shortness of
the cannon bone, it is far from goat-like. The goat idea, indeed, has
little more foundation than the suggestive resemblance of the profile
with its caprine beard. It is truly no goat at all, and should more
properly be regarded as an aberrant antelope, if anything could be
justly termed "aberrant" in an aggregation of animals, hardly any two of
which agree in all respects of structure. No American fossils seem to
point to _Oreamnos_, and as _Nemorhaedus_ extends to Japan and
eastern Siberia, it is probable that it was an Asiatic immigrant, not
earlier than the Pleistocene.

From this intricate genealogical tangle one turns with relief to the
deer family, where the course of development lies reasonably plain. If
the rank of animals in the aristocracy of nature were to be fixed by the
remoteness of the period to which we know their ancestors, the deer
would out-rank their bovine cousins by a full half of the Miocene
period, and the study of fossils onward from this early beginning
presents few clearer lines of evidence supporting modern theories
respecting the development of species, than is shown in the increasing
size and complexity of the antlers in succeeding geological ages, from
the simple fork of the middle Miocene to those with three prongs of the
late Miocene, the four-pronged of the Pliocene, and finally to the
many-branched shapes of the Pleistocene and the present age. Now it is
further true that each one of these types is represented today in the
mature antlers of existing deer, from the small South American species
with a simple spike, up to the wapiti and red deer carrying six or eight
points, and still more significant is it that the whole story is
recapitulated in the growth of each individual of the higher races. The
earliest cervine animals known seem to have had no antlers at all, a
stage to which the fawn of the year corresponds; the subsequent normal
addition in the life-history, of a tine for each year of growth until
the mature antler is reached, answering with exactness to the stages of
advance shown in the development-h