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Plate XXIV.
Soon after the red deer became suffieiently numerous in the Pelorus bush to justify the Marlborough Acclimatisation Society issuing shooting licenses I commenced collecting heads of all ages, regardless of their appearance, my object being to study the growth of the horns.
Many of the heads that came into my possession appeared deformed, owing to the right and the left horns differing much in size and outline. This want of symmetry I soon perceived was common to animals of every age, from fawns with simple horns to old stags with many-branched antlers.
Looking over a collection of these unsymmetrical heads to ascertain whether there were any marks of violence which might account for the deformity, I noticed that in all the right horn was larger and better shaped.
After this discovery I carefully examined every deer's head—shapely or unshapely—that came within my reach, and found that wherever there was a perceptible difference in the size of the two horns the right horn, without exception, was larger than the left.
The accompanying photograph (Plate XXIV) by Mr. Paul Clifford shows two fawns' heads and the head of an old stag, in all of which the greater size of the right horn is very conquite symmetical from a short way off, but a closer examination shows the right horn is stouter than the left. Several
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heads of this description have come under my notice, showing that the difference in the size of the horn does not always amount to a deformity.
In a note to an article published in the Zoologist for March, 1904, Mr. A. Heneage Cocks records the following: “I have never seen the fact noticed that the right eye of young mammals opens before the left. I do not remember an exception among wild animals, nor even among domestic animals, though it is very likely some occur in the latter clas. From the time the lids of the right eye begin to part to the time the left eye is fully opened takes generally from thirty-six to forty hours.” Commenting on this the editor of Knowledge remarks, “The fact is as new to us as it is to Mr. Cocks, and requires an explanation. The suggestion naturally occurs that the phenomenon is connected with “right-handedness” in the human species.”
It would be interesting to discover whether stags, when fighting, use the right and left horns indiscriminately, or whether they endeavour to strike with one horn more than the other.