Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 5.djvu/350

336 Every one who visits a museum of natural history experiences surprise at sight of the moose, a kind of enormous deer. A clumsy form, long legs, a thick muzzle, an extremely short neck, a tuft on the withers, a dewlap fringed with hair under the throat, give the animal an extraordinary appearance, which, in the male, is heightened by huge horns, flattened and serrated on the outer edge. The moose inhabits the marshy forests of the northern parts of Europe and America; it is affirmed that it may still be found at some points in eastern Germany, and it is chiefly met with in Sweden and Norway, Lithuania, the north of Russia, Siberia, and Tartary. It was formerly spread over all Germany, as the hunts of the middle ages preserved in narratives prove. For the authors of the seventeenth or eighteenth century the moose continues a tolerably common species in Poland and Sweden, but is rare for the moderns. Though become quite uncommon in Europe within a hundred years, it continued very abundant at the same period in the Northern United States of America; but every winter it is more eagerly pursued, and this fine animal has ceased to be reckoned among the resources of food for the inhabitants.

In early days our European deer roved everywhere in herds under the great forests, and now scarcely any of them exist in France, except in particularly well-protected forests, where they may be counted by single specimens. Every one has heard retired hunters say again and again, in speaking of deer, "Very soon there will be no more of them." The smaller ruminants, that delight in the cliffs of the highest mountains, and the neighborhood of glaciers, are spared as little. The destruction of the chamois and wild-goat is going on with lamentable rapidity, and it is completed with no other object than the desire of exhibiting skill. The mountaineer is proud of having killed a chamois, and if he kills several he thinks himself a personage deserving admiration. Go to Switzerland, and they will show you, in a hundred places, some part of the mountains where herds of chamois were formerly seen, and you will hear it almost uniformly declared that now there are very few of them, or none at all, left. Go to the Pyrenees; in that region, where the chamois is called the isar, they will tell you that the isar is now exceedingly rare. The chamois, the single European representative of the antelope group, being found scattered over all the great mountains of Europe, will doubtless long maintain itself against the unceasing pursuit of hunters; but the pretty wild-goat of the Alps, once very widely spread, no longer exists, except in a very confined part of the Piedmontese Alps, and perhaps in some nook of Mont Blanc. The chamois and goat, agile animals frequenting most inaccessible regions, swift to fly at the approach of danger, often escaped the hunter's aim when the weapon carried no great distance; long-range guns have become the scourge of Alpine animals.

Thus, within historic times, the Bos primigenius, the huge,