DEEMS, CHARLES (ALEXANDER) FORCE (1820-1893), American clergyman, was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on the 4th of December 1820. He was a precocious child and delivered lectures on temperance and on Sunday schools before he was fourteen years old. He graduated at Dickinson College in 1839, taught and preached in New York city for a few months, in 1840 took charge of the Methodist Episcopal church at Asbury, New Jersey, and removed in the next year to North Carolina, where he was general agent for the American Bible Society. He was professor of logic and rhetoric at the University of North Carolina in 1842-1847, and professor of natural sciences at Randolph-Macon College (then at Boydton, Virginia) in 1847-1848, and after two years of preaching at Newbern, N.C., he held for four years (1850-1854) the presidency of Greensboro (N.C.) Female College. He continued as a Methodist Episcopal clergyman at various pastorates in North Carolina from 1854 to 1865, for the last seven years being a presiding elder and in 1859 to 1863 being the proprietor of St Austin’s Institute, Wilson. In 1865 he settled in New York City, where in 1866 he began preaching in the chapel of New York University, and in 1868 he established and became the pastor of the undenominational Church of the Strangers, which in 1870 occupied the former Mercer Street Presbyterian church, purchased and given to Dr Deems by Cornelius Vanderbilt; there he remained until his death in New York city on the 18th of November 1893. He was one of the founders (1881) and president of the American Institute of Christian Philosophy and for ten years was editor of its organ, Christian Thought. Dr Deems was an earnest temperance advocate, as early as 1852 worked (unsuccessfully) for a general prohibition law in North Carolina, and in his later years allied himself with the Prohibition party. He was influential in securing from Cornelius Vanderbilt the endowment of Vanderbilt University, in Nashville, Tennessee. He was a man of rare personal and literary charm; he edited The Southern Methodist Episcopal Pulpit (1846-1852) and The Annals of Southern Methodism (1855-1857); he compiled Devotional Melodies (1842), and, with the assistance of Phoebe Cary, one of his parishioners, Hymns for all Christians (1869; revised, 1881); and he published many books, among which were: The Life of Dr Adam Clarke (1840); The Triumph of Peace and other Poems (1840); The Home Altar (1850); Jesus (1872), which ran through many editions and several revisions, the title being changed in 1880 to The Light of the Nations; Sermons (1885); The Gospel of Common Sense (1888); The Gospel of Spiritual Insight (1891) and My Septuagint (1892). The Charles F. Deems Lectureship in Philosophy was founded in his honour in 1895 at New York University by the American Institute of Christian Philosophy.
His Autobiography (New York, 1897) is autobiographical only to 1847, the memoir being completed by his two sons.
DEER (O. E. déor, díor, a common Teutonic word, meaning a wild animal, cf. Ger. Tier, Du. dier, &c., probably from a root dhus-, to breathe), originally the name of one of two British species, the red-deer or the fallow-deer, but now extended to all the members of the family Cervidae, in the section Pecora of the suborder Artiodactyla of the order Ungulata. (See [Pecora]; [Artiodactyla] and [Ungulata].) Briefly, deer may be defined as Pecora presenting the following characteristics:—either antlers present in the male, or when these are absent, the upper canines large and sabre-like, and the lateral metacarpal bones represented only by their lower extremities. This definition will include the living and also most of the extinct forms, although in some of the latter the lateral metacarpal bones not only retain their lower ends, but are complete in their entire length.
The leading characters of antlers are described under [Pecora], but these structures may be defined somewhat more fully in the following passage from the present writer’s Deer of all Lands:—
“Antlers are supported on a pair of solid bony processes, or pedicles, arising from the frontal bones of the skull, of which they form an inseparable portion; and if in a fully adult deer these pedicles be sawn through, they will generally be found to consist of solid, ivory-like bone, devoid of perceptible channels for the passage of blood-vessels. The pedicles are always covered with skin well supplied with blood-vessels; and in young deer, or those in which the antlers have been comparatively recently shed, the covering of skin extends over their summits, when they appear as longer or shorter projections on the forehead, according to the species. When the first or a new antler is about to be formed, the summits of these pedicles become tender, and bear small velvet-like knobs, which have a high temperature, and are supplied by an extra quantity of blood, which commences to deposit bony matter. This deposition of bony matter progresses very rapidly, and although in young deer and the adults of some species the resulting antler merely forms a simple spike, or a single fork, in full-grown individuals of the majority it assumes a more or less complexly branched structure. All this time the growing antler is invested with a skin clothed with exceedingly fine short hairs, and is most liberally supplied with blood-vessels; this sensitive skin being called the velvet. Towards the completion of its growth a more or less prominent ring of bone, termed the burr or coronet, is deposited at its base just above the junction with the pedicle; this ring tending to constrict the blood-vessels, and thus cut off the supply of blood from the antlers....
“When the antlers are freed from the velvet—a process usually assisted by the animal rubbing them against tree stems or boughs—they have a more or less rugose surface, owing to the grooves formed in them by the nutrient blood-vessels. Although a few living species have the antlers in the form of simple spikes in the adult male, in the great majority of species they are more or less branched; while in some, like the elk and fallow-deer, they expand into broad palmated plates, with tines, or snags, on one or both margins. In the antlers of the red-deer group, which form the type of the whole series, the following names have been applied to their different component parts and branches. The main shaft is termed the beam; the first or lowest tine the brow-tine; the second the bez-tine; the third the trez-tine, or royal; and the branched portion forming the summit the crown, or surroyals. But the antlers of all deer by no means conform to this type; and in certain groups other names have to be adopted for the branches.
“The antlers of young deer are in the form of simple spikes; and this form is retained in the South American brockets, although the simple antlers of these deer appear due to degeneration, and are not primitive types. Indeed, no living deer shows such primitive spike-like antlers in the adult, and it is doubtful whether such a type is displayed by any known extinct form, although many have a simple fork. In the deer of the sambar group, where the antlers never advance beyond a three-tined type, the shedding is frequently, if not invariably, very irregular; but in the majority at least of the species with complex antlers the replacement is annual, the new appendages attaining their full development immediately before the pairing-season. In such species there is a more or less regular annual increase in the complexity of the antlers up to a certain period of life, after which they begin to degenerate.”
The Cervidae are distributed all over Europe, Asia, Northern Africa and America, but are unknown in Africa south of the Sahara. They are undoubtedly a group of European or Asiatic origin, and obtained an entrance into America at a time when that continent was connected with Asia by way of Bering Strait.