terated in the camel and dromedary,
which traverse arid deserts.--OWEN _on Limbs_, p. 34; see also BELL _on
the Hand_, ch. iii.]

_Deer_.--"Deer," says the truthful old chronicler, Robert Knox, "are in
great abundance in the woods, from the largeness of a cow to the
smallness of a hare, for here is a creature in this land no bigger than
the latter, though every part rightly resembleth a deer: it is called
_meminna_, of a grey colour, with white spots and good meat."[1] The
little creature which thus dwelt in the recollection of the old man, as
one of the memorials of his long captivity, is the small "musk deer"[2]
so called in India, although neither sex is provided with a musk-bag;
and the Europeans in Ceylon know it by the name of the moose deer. Its
extreme length never reaches two feet; and of those which were
domesticated about my house, few exceeded ten inches in height, their
graceful limbs being of similar delicate proportion. It possesses long
and extremely large tusks, with which it inflicts a severe bite. The
interpreter moodliar of Negombo had a _milk white_ meminna in 1847,
which he designed to send home as an acceptable present to Her Majesty,
but it was unfortunately killed by an accident.[3]

[Footnote 1: KNOX'S _Relation, &c_., book i. c. 6.]

[Footnote 2: Moschus meminna.]

[Footnote 3: When the English took possession of Kandy, in 1803, they
found "five beautiful milk-white deer in the palace, which was noted as
a very extraordinary thing."--_Letter_ in Appendix to PERCIVAL'S
_Ceylon_, p. 428. The writer does not say of what species they were.]

_Ceylon Elk_.--In the mountains, the Ceylon elk[1], which reminds one of
the red deer of Scotland, attains the height of four or five feet; it
abounds in all places which are intersected by shady rivers; where,
though its hunting affords an endless resource to the sportsmen, its
venison scarcely equals in quality the inferior beef of the lowland ox.
In the glades and park-like openings that diversify the great forests of
the interior, the spotted Axis troops in herds as numerous as the fallow
deer in England; and, in journeys through the jungle, when often
dependent on the guns of our party for the precarious supply of the
table, we found the flesh of the Axis[2] and the Muntjac[3] a sorry
substitute for that of the pea-fowl, the jungle-cock, and flamingo. The
occurrence of albinos is very frequent in troops of the axis. Deer's
horns are an article of exp