to it, and are no older than the Pleistocene of the central United
States; in earlier periods its history is a blank about which it is
useless to speculate.

The last of our three anomalies, the white, or mountain goat
(_Oreamnos montanus_), is not as completely orphaned as the other
two, for it seems quite surely to be connected with a small and peculiar
series consisting of the European chamois and several species of
_Nemorhaedus_ inhabiting eastern Asia and Sumatra. These are often
called mountain antelopes, or goat antelopes. So little is yet known of
the soft anatomy of the white goat that we are much in the dark as to
its minute resemblances, but its glandular system is certainly
suggestive of the chamois, and many of its attitudes are strikingly
similar. In all the points in which it approaches goats it is like some,
at least, among antelopes, while in the elongated spines of the anterior
dorsal vertebrae, which support the hump, and in extreme shortness of
the cannon bone, it is far from goat-like. The goat idea, indeed, has
little more foundation than the suggestive resemblance of the profile
with its caprine beard. It is truly no goat at all, and should more
properly be regarded as an aberrant antelope, if anything could be
justly termed "aberrant" in an aggregation of animals, hardly any two of
which agree in all respects of structure. No American fossils seem to
point to _Oreamnos_, and as _Nemorhaedus_ extends to Japan and
eastern Siberia, it is probable that it was an Asiatic immigrant, not
earlier than the Pleistocene.

From this intricate genealogical tangle one turns with relief to the
deer family, where the course of development lies reasonably plain. If
the rank of animals in the aristocracy of nature were to be fixed by the
remoteness of the period to which we know their ancestors, the deer