82 Mr. J. E. Harting on Forest Animals.
to do, and they had better and more abundant pasturage
than now, when the woods are cut down and the land is
highly cultivated. Abundance of nutritious food usually
produces antlers of large growth.
I have referred briefly to the character of the teeth in
Ruminants. Red deer, both male and female, at one year
old have two cutting teeth in the lower jaw ; at two years
old they have four; at three, six; and at four, eight
cutting teeth in the lower jaw. Stags when five years
old have two canines, or tusks, in the upper jaw; and
occasionally, but rarely, very old hinds have these tusks
also, but less fully developed than in the stags.
Deer pair in the autumn, a fact which the stags do not
fail to announce by their loud "belling," and by the
battles which they fight, when the crashing of their antlers
may be heard at a considerable distance. The young are
brought forth in the summer-time, when a high growth of
fern favours their concealment.
The red-deer very rarely produces more than one young
one at a birth.* This is born in June, and, up to the age
of three or four months, is spotted with white like a
fallow-deer. Gradually it assumes a uniform colour.
With regard to food, deer subsist chiefly on grass, leaves,
and tender shoots of trees, beech-mast, acorns, and even
fungus. Fallow-deer are very partial to horse-chestnuts;
and both species are particularly fond of salt, which they
will come a long way to lick when they have once dis-
covered that it has been laid down for them. It is doubt-
less the saline flavour which attracts them to gnaw antlers
which have been shed ; and this in some measure accounts
for the infrequency with which such antlers are found.
Collyns was assured by keepers and hillmen of great
experience and undoubted veracity in Scotland that it is a
common occurrence for the hinds to eat the cast horns,
but he was never able to confirm it from his own expe-
rience in Devonshire and Somersetshire. During the past
* So says Scrope, in his "Days of Deer Stalking;" but Collyns
mentions three instances in which red-deer hinds produced twins—
pp. 48, 50.