istory of the race. A year of
individual life is the symbol of a geological period of
progression. This is a marvelous record, of which we may
say--paraphrasing with Huxley the well-known saying of Voltaire--"if it
had not already existed, evolution must have been invented to explain."

The least technical, and for the present purpose the most useful of the
characters distinguishing existing deer from all of the bovine stock,
lies in the antlers, which are solid, of bony substance, and are
annually shed. They are present in the males of all species except the
Chinese water deer, and the very divergent musk-deer, which probably
should not be regarded as a deer at all. They are normally absent from
all females except those of the genus _Rangifer_. Most deer have
canine teeth in the upper jaw, though they are absent in the moose, in
the distinctively American type and a few others. The cleaned skull
always shows a large vacuity in the outer wall in front of the orbit,
which prevents the lachrymal bone from reaching the nasals. No deer has
a gall bladder. There are many other distinctions, but as all have
exceptions they are of value only in combinations.

The earliest known deer, belonging to the genus _Dremotherium_, or
_Amphitragulus_, from the middle Tertiary of France, were of small
size and had four toes, canine teeth and no antlers. Their successors
seem to have borne simple forked antlers or horns, probably covered with
hair, and permanently fixed on the skull. Very similar animals existed
in contemporaneous and later deposits in North America. From this point
the course of progress is tolerably clear as to deer in general,
although we are not sure of all the intermediate details--for it must
not be forgotten that a series of types exhibiting progressive
modifications in each succeeding geological period is quite as
conclusive in pointing out the genealogy of an existing group as if we
knew each individual term in the ancestral series of each of its
members. Thus we do not yet know whether the peculiar antler of the
distinctively American deer, of the genus _Mazama_, is derived from
an American source or took its origin in the old world, for the fossil
antlers known as _Anoglochis_, from the Pliocene of Europe, are
quite suggestive of the _Mazama_ style, but as nothing is known of
the other skeletal details of _Anoglochis_, any such connection
must at present be purely speculative, but the element of doubt in this