"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.