small troop of mares; and it is certain that these stallions would
never have approached each other without fighting. Both had tried
singly to fight the English horse and drive away his mares, but had
failed. One day they came in TOGETHER and attacked him. This was seen
by the capitan who had charge of the horses, and who, on riding to the
spot, found one of the two stallions engaged with the English horse,
whilst the other was driving away the mares, and had already separated
four from the rest. The capitan settled the matter by driving the whole
party into the corral, for the wild stallions would not leave the
mares.
Male animals which are provided with efficient cutting or tearing teeth
for the ordinary purposes of life, such as the carnivora, insectivora,
and rodents, are seldom furnished with weapons especially adapted for
fighting with their rivals. The case is very different with the males
of many other animals. We see this in the horns of stags and of certain
kinds of antelopes in which the females are hornless. With many animals
the canine teeth in the upper or lower jaw, or in both, are much larger
in the males than in the females, or are absent in the latter, with the
exception sometimes of a hidden rudiment. Certain antelopes, the
musk-deer, camel, horse, boar, various apes, seals, and the walrus,
offer instances. In the females of the walrus the tusks are sometimes
quite absent. (4. Mr. Lamont ( Seasons with the Sea-Horses, 1861, p.
143) says that a good tusk of the male walrus weighs 4 pounds, and is
longer than that of the female, which weighs about 3 pounds. The males
are described as fighting ferociously. On the occasional absence of the
tusks in the female, see Mr. R. Brown, Proceedings, Zoological
Society, 1868, p. 429.) In the male elephant of India and in the male
dugong (5. Owen, Anatomy of Vertebrates, vol. iii. p. 283.) the upper
incisors form offensive weapons. In the male narwhal the left canine
alone is developed into the well-known, spirally-twisted, so-called
horn, which is sometimes from nine to ten feet in length. It is
believed that the males use these horns for fighting together; for an
unbroken one can rarely be got, and occasionally one may be found with
the point of another jammed into the broken place. (6. Mr. R. Brown,
in Proc. Zool. Soc. 1869, p. 553. See Prof. Turner, in Journal of
Anat. and Phys. 1872, p. 76, on the homological nature of these tusks.
Also Mr. J.W. Clarke on two tusks being developed in the males, in
Proceedings of the Zoological Society, 1871, p. 42.) The tooth on the
opposite side of the head in the male consists of a rudiment about ten
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