advantage to its possessor over the common buck. Besides enabling him to run more swiftly through the thick woods and underbrush (every hunter knows that does and yearling bucks run much more rapidly than the large bucks when armed with their cumbrous antlers), the spike-horn is a more effective weapon than the common antler. With this advantage the spike-horn bucks are gaining upon the common bucks, and may, in time, entirely supersede them in the Adirondacks. Undoubtedly, the first spike-horn buck was merely an accidental freak of nature. But his spike-horns gave him an advantage, and enabled him to propagate his peculiarity. His descendants having a like advantage, have propagated the peculiarity in a constantly increasing ratio, till they are slowly crowding the antlered deer from the region they inhabit." A critic has well objected to this account by asking, why, if the simple horns are now so advantageous, were the branched antlers of the parent-form ever developed ? To this I can only answer by remarking, that a new mode of attack with new weapons might be a great advantage, as shewn by the case of the Ovis cycloceros, who thus conquered a domestic ram famous for his fighting power. Though the branched antlers of a stag are well adapted for fighting with his rivals, and though it might be an advantage to the prong-horned variety slowly to acquire long and branched horns, if he had to fight only with others of the same kind, yet it by no means follows that branched horns would be the best fitted for conquering a foe differently armed. In the foregoing case of the Oryx leucoryx, it is almost certain that the victory would rest with an antelope having short horns, and who therefore did not need to kneel down, though an oryx might profit by having still longer horns, if he fought only with his proper rivals.
Male quadrupeds, which are furnished with tusks, use them in various ways, as in the case of horns. The boar strikes laterally and upwards; the musk-deer downwards with serious effect.[1] The walrus, though having so short a neck and so unwieldy a body, "can strike either upwards, or downwards, or sideways, with equal dexterity."[2] I was informed by the late Dr. Falconer, that the Indian elephant fights in a different manner according to the position and curvature of his tusks. When they are directed forwards and upwards he is able to fling a tiger to a great distance—it is said to even thirty feet; when they are short and turned downwards he endeavours suddenly to pin the
