The history of the camels (Camelidæ) is very similar to that of the horse. The family originated in North America, where it developed from little creatures, by changes and adaptations to a life on dry uplands, as did the horses, into a species which in the Pleistocene was a third larger than any now living. Meanwhile camels had made their way over the land which in the later Tertiary connected Alaska with Siberia, into the high plains of Asia, where the camels found favorable circumstances and developed into the two species we know. Others migrated, earlier in the family history, into South America, where they ceased to grow tall after the camel model, but became the huanacos of Patagonia, of which the llamas (yah-mas) are prehistorically domesticated descendants, and into the woolly vicuñas of the Andean mountains.
| LLAMA |
| (Lama peruviana) |
| A domesticated animal of South America |
Modern camels are of two kinds—the single-humped and the double-humped. The latter, or "Bactrian," is confined to Asia, and is able to endure the cold and snows of the tablelands of that continent, where its burdens are carried in winter as well as summer. What was the extent to which the single-humped, or ordinary camel, ranged before its prehistoric enslavement by men, we do not know—if it roamed the deserts of Arabia and northern Africa as well as those of Turkestan, no evidence of it remains. A few small-sized, gaunt, wary, and swift-footed camels still run wild among the almost inaccessible sand dunes of the Gobi Desert, but it is not certain that they are relics of the original wild stock. At any rate the camels have always been creatures of the world's waste places, and all their quaint peculiarities such as their sole pads and the water-storing sacs in their stomachs (rumens) are adaptations to their desert home.
| BACTRIAN CAMEL |
| (Camelus bactrianus) |
| The two-humped camel of Asia |
The deer family (Cervidæ) is of great extent, and world-wide in its distribution, except that it is entirely absent from Africa and Australia. In none are more than two toes of use in walking, the second and fifth toes hanging at some distance behind and above the functional hoofs, which are narrow and pointed. All have slender, long legs, giving swiftness and great leaping power; and very short tails, with the exception of the rare and peculiar David's deer of China, whose tail is almost like that of a cow. The coat of hair is short and brittle, reddish brown or foxy in summer, grayer in winter, in some species plain, or spotted only when fawns, in others variegated with small, whitish spots. The distinctive badge of the family, however, is the pair of horns borne on the heads of the males (also by females in the reindeer and caribou), collectively and more properly called "antlers," since they are not composed of horn, but of true bony material. They are poised on two protuberances on the top of the skull, where in spring arises a growth of fleshy material, covered with velvety hair, that rapidly takes the shape of the antler characteristic of the species (and age) of the deer, and as it grows is filled with lime salts that gradually replace all the tissues. Then the "velvet" dries and scales off and the ivorylike antler emerges. This remains as a serviceable weapon and ornament of the buck until the beginning of winter, when its attachment to the skull loosens, and the antler drops off. This happens annually in the case of all deer—one of the common and universal facts in zoölogy that many find it hard to believe. The "horns" of the various deer vary in size from short and simple "spikes" to the wide-branching antlers of the moose and wapiti; but these last are acquired only when the buck is fully matured, the yearling showing only a spike, and acquiring branches ("tines") one by one annually as he grows until his proper complement is reached; but in a few small species no branching ever occurs.
The family contains many genera and species, but only the most noticeable can be mentioned. The most familiar one, probably, is the small, spotted fallow deer of southern Europe, bands of which ornament the parks of grand estates in Great Britain and on the continent; its antlers broaden at the end into the form known as "palmated," on account of its resemblance to an open hand with fingers. Even more celebrated in song and story is the red deer, the males of which are "stags" and the females "hinds." These are large, dark, reddish brown animals, with grandly symmetrical antlers, every tine or "point" on which—seven on each side in a "full head"—has its name in the language of hunting. This deer, still wild in the highlands of Scotland and in the mountainous forests of eastern Europe, is also to be found right across Asia, where local varieties go by the names of "maral" in northern Persia, "hangul" in Kashmir, and so on to eastern Siberia, where far taller species live than are known to Europe; and all vary in minor particulars only from our wapiti—which it is fair to regard as of the same stock.
None of all these stags is more stately than the American wapiti—the "elk" of all western men—which once abounded from the Adirondacks and southern Alleghenies to California and the borders of Alaska. Everywhere of old it was plentiful and easy to kill, and the pioneers swiftly destroyed it as civilization was pushed westward, until its mighty herds have vanished almost as completely as those of the bison. It thrived anywhere and everywhere, climbing the wooded heights of the Appalachians (where the very last one was killed near Ridgway, Pennsylvania, in 1869), loafing in the warm, well-watered valleys of the Mississippi basin, herding in the sun-baked plains, or scrambling up and down the roughest of western sierras. Equally broad in its appetite, those that browsed or ate mast and fruits in the eastern woods did no better than those which grazed on the bunch-grass plateaus from the Rio Grande to Peace River; and in winter it would keep fat where other deer or cattle might starve, because able to paw through the snow to the dried grass.