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Show attribute non-palmation of the horns entirely to imperfect < evelopment of the animal, caused by insufficient food in their eailiei years, or degeneration caused by old age, wounds, or otherwise. We did not reckon an Elk to be adult until he had at least seven points 011 each horn, and the oldest and largest bull that I ever killed, which had been well known in the district, and continually hunted for at least ten years, had, when I killed him, well-palmated horns of about one-half the size of what they ought to have been in an adult animal of his size, showing that in the Elk, as in the red deer, the horns degenerate in size and number of points in old age, which may be fifteen or twenty years or less. Two such instances of degeneration are figured. Text-fig. 24, p. 147, is the head of an old Elk killed by Thomas Bate, Esq., in Lurudal Namdalen on Sept. 25,1890. The horns measure 43 inches in expanse, with ten points 011 one side and eleven 011 the other; the points are, however, not arranged in a uniform series 011 the edge of the palm, and the development of the brow-antlers is very abnormal. The shed horns of what was probably the same animal were picked up on the same ground in the year previous by Col. Sullivan, and are of the same type with the same number of points. An Elk displaying still more remarkable abnormal degeneration was killed by Capt. Ferrand, and is shown in text-fig. 26, p. 149. This animal was supposed to be 25 years old or more, and the incidents of his death have been most graphically described in the ‘ Badminton Magazine ' for March 1901 by Capt. Ferrand. The horns are now in the Ipswich Museum. The largest horns I have seen from Norway, belonging to an animal which I unsuccessfully hunted for many days, but which was afterwards killed by a farmer, and sold to me by Mr. Bruun of Trondhjem, were 54 inches in width, with nine points on each side (see text-fig. 18, p. 134); but there is a pair of shed horns in Sir Henry Pottinger's house at Mo, of one of which I send a tracing (see text-fig. 22, p. 142), showing sixteen points 011 each side. It is well known in Norway that the Elk of the southern districts, which are much more fully timbered, and where there is nothing like the same extent of open fell and good feed as in North and South Trondhjem, and where both sexes are much more constantly hunted and the calves frequently deprived of their mother's milk in September, do not, in modern times at least, produce anything like such fine heads as those of the wilder districts of the north, the conditions being probably very similar to those described by Dr. Lonnberg as in the southern provinces of Sweden '. Taking his nine figures, I should be inclined to say that all excef>t 2 and 3 might, if they had come from Siberia, have been considered as belonging to A Ices bedfordice ; and form, to my mind, ample proof of that being (if the horns belong to 1 Mr. Percy Godman informs me that a well-known Elk-hunter in South Norway considers that 011 his propert}' Elk have diminished by two-thirds in the last ten years, and attributes this decrease to their having eaten and destroyed all the " leaf-trees," i. e. willow, mountain-ash, and aspen. ON TIIE ELK IN NORWAY. [Feb. 3, |
