spread widely on touching the ground; the hoofs are flattened and broad, with the extremities turned upwards; and the false hoofs descend behind till, in walking, they make a clattering sound.  In traversing the marshes, this combination of abnormal incidents serves to give extraordinary breadth to the foot, and not only prevents the buffalo from sinking inconveniently in soft ground[1], but at the same time presents no obstacle to the withdrawal of his foot from the mud.

[Footnote 1:  PROFESSOR OWEN has noticed a similar fact regarding the rudiments of the second and fifth digits in the instance of the elk and bison, which have them largely expanded where they inhabit swampy ground; whilst they are nearly obliterated in the camel and dromedary, which traverse arid deserts.—­OWEN on Limbs, p. 34; see also BELL on the Hand, ch. iii.]

Deer.—­“Deer,” says the truthful old chronicler, Robert Knox, “are in great abundance in the woods, from the largeness of a cow to the smallness of a hare, for here is a creature in this land no bigger than the latter, though every part rightly resembleth a deer:  it is called meminna, of a grey colour, with white spots and good meat."[1] The little creature which thus dwelt in the recollection of the old man, as one of the memorials of his long captivity, is the small “musk deer"[2] so called in India, although neither sex is provided with a musk-bag; and the Europeans in Ceylon know it by the name of the moose deer.  Its extreme length never reaches two feet; and of those which were domesticated about my house, few exceeded ten inches in height, their graceful limbs being of similar delicate proportion.  It possesses long and extremely large tusks, with which it inflicts a severe bite.  The interpreter moodliar of Negombo had a milk white meminna in 1847, which he designed to send home as an acceptable present to Her Majesty, but it was unfortunately killed by an accident.[3]

[Footnote 1:  KNOX’S Relation, &c., book i. c. 6.]

[Footnote 2:  Moschus meminna.]

[Footnote 3:  When the English took possession of Kandy, in 1803, they found “five beautiful milk-white deer in the palace, which was noted as a very extraordinary thing.”—­Letter in Appendix to PERCIVAL’S Ceylon, p. 428.  The writer does not say of what species they were.]

Ceylon Elk.—­In the mountains, the Ceylon elk[1], which reminds one of the red deer of Scotland, attains the height of four or five feet; it abounds in all places which are intersected by shady rivers; where, though its hunting affords an endless resource to the sportsmen, its venison scarcely equals in quality the inferior beef of the lowland ox.  In the glades and park-like openings that diversify the great forests of the interior, the spotted Axis troops in herds as numerous as the fallow deer in England; and, in journeys through the jungle, when often dependent on the guns of our party for the precarious supply of the table, we found the flesh of the Axis[2] and the Muntjac[3] a sorry substitute for that of the pea-fowl, the jungle-cock, and flamingo.  The occurrence of albinos is very frequent in troops of the axis.  Deer’s horns are an article of export from Ceylon, and considerable quantities are annually sent to the United Kingdom.