The true Camel (Camelus Dromedarius).
Still more strange in some ways are the giraffes,[169] of which we know very little, except that large forms like them once wandered in Europe.[170] For they, with only the same number of bones as other animals, have these so lengthened out that, as they wander in the tropical forests, their slender legs raise them above all other animals, and their long neck, which nevertheless has only seven joints like all the milk-givers, enables them to reach the high trees, so as to strip off the leaves with their ribbon-like tongues.
But we should want much space to discuss such curious forms as these, and we need not go further than the ordinary deer of our parks to read a strange history of how life has gradually armed her children. The giraffe with his long neck to feed, and his wide straggling legs to fly swiftly from danger, has only short hairy covered knobs on his forehead for horns. But the stag, who is obliged to fight, especially when he wishes to secure his wives, has antlers so branched and so heavy that it is a wonder that his neck can carry them.
Now it is in the autumn that the stags fight and struggle together to secure the leadership of the does, and it is then that their antlers are finest and strongest, and they remain so during the whole winter. But when the early spring comes, the bone of the antlers dries up near the head, where there is a little ridge round it, and soon they fall off, a skin forms over the place, and new ones begin to grow. Then as the little knobs push forward and increase, how lovely they are, for the skin covered with soft hair is all over them, carrying the network of blood-vessels which secrete the bone within. So fast do they grow that antlers weighing seventy-two pounds will be complete in ten weeks, and when they are finished, the “velvet,” as this soft skin is called, dries up, and they rip it off against a tree, leaving the bare bone.
Fig. 70.
The Red-deer with branching antlers.[171]—(After Ridinger).
Thus equipped, the stag is a match for the world, and he knows it; his bearing is proud and haughty, and instead of flying from danger he will turn round and fight fiercely when attacked. And now comes the curious part of his history. In the different stags of the world we see all kinds of antlers, from one single spike like a stiletto in some American stags, to the superb antlers of the Red-deer, some of which have as many as sixty-six spikes. But when the red-deer begins to grow his antlers, he does not get this splendid tree in the first year, he has only a single spike; this falls off, and the next year he grows them with a second branch; the third year both branches become doubled and another appears, and so each year as he grows them afresh they are more and more complicated, till at last the whole branched tree grows up in a few months. Now in thus increasing his spikes year by year, he is in his own person most curiously retracing the steps of his ancestors in ages past; for, as we have seen, the first deerlike animals had no horns, then as the ages passed on we find that they had single spikes; later on, their descendants grew antlers of two branches, and later still more complicated ones, so that the race put on little by little those magnificent antlers which now the red-deer and others carry, and meanwhile the various species spread all over the world, except into Australia and Africa, south of the desert.
Still, even the stags have times in the year, before their antlers are grown, when they are comparatively defenceless. There remains yet another branch of the “ruminant” family, even better provided with weapons. These are the antelopes, wild cattle, and buffaloes, for with them the horns never fall off. The reason of this is that they grow in quite a different manner from the stags’ antlers. Instead of the bone being laid down by the skin, it grows out as a core from the forehead, and the skin over it hardens into horn as it grows, so that the tip of a bull’s horns is the oldest part.
Fig. 71.