Page:Collier's New Encyclopedia v. 03.djvu/353

DEER 301 DEERFIELD Oceanica. The first sounding was made near the Marquesas at a depth of 1,955 fathoms. It seemed to prove that this group of islands rises from a plateau 2,000 fathoms deep and 50 miles wide. Numerous soundings were taken in the North Pacific by vessels of the United States Navy in 1900 for the purpose of developing feasible cable routes between the Hawaiian and Philippine Islands. A soimding of 5,269 fathoms, about 70 miles to the S. E. of Guam Island by the "Nero," in 1899, was taken in a locality near where the "Challenger" in 1875 took its greatest sounding (4,475 fathoms). This was surpassed by the German survey ship "Planet" in 1913, which made a sounding of 5,348 fathoms 4 miles E. of the north of Mindanao. The best sounding-rod (as these de- vices are termed) of to-day is doubtless the Brooke devise as modified by Ad- miral Sigsbee. Sigsbee's modification may be described as follows: the sinker is an 8-inch cannon-shot weighing 60 pounds. A hole runs through it large enough to admit the sounding rod. Upon the shot are cast two ears, like the ears «)n a pail, to which a wire bai), like a pail-handle, is attached. The sounding- line is fastened to the ring shown near the top of the cuts. The sounding-rod is a brass tube about one-eighth of an inch thick, quite sharp on the lower edge. It operates thus : The shot is placed upon the sounding-rod. As long as the weight of the shot is borne by the sounding-line the hook will sustain the shot. But the moment that strain is relieved by the shot striking the bottom the hook doubles under and releases the wire handle of the shot. At the same time the weight of the shot buries the sharp lower edge of the sounding-rod in the bottom. This forces up a valve and a portion of the bottom enters. At the first movement toward reeling in the line the shot slips off the sounding-rod and remains behind, and the valve at the bottom of the sound- ing-rod closes, imprisoning a sample of the bottom. This device has been tried many hundreds of times in great depths, and it has rarely failed to detach the shot as well as bring up a liberal sample of the bottom. DEER, a family of the ruminants dis- tinguished chiefly by the nature of the horns or antlers, which, with the single exception of the reindeer, are borne by the males only. They are bony through- out, are annually shed and reproduced at the breeding season increasing each time in size and the number of branches till, in the old males of some species, they attain an enormous size. The ant- lers are carried on the frontal bone, and are produced by a process not un- like that by which injuries of osseous structures are made good in man. At first they are covered with a sensitive skin or "velvet"; but as development pro- ceeds this skin dries up and peels oft; a bony ridge or "burr" being formed on the antler just above its base of attach- ment to the frontal bone. When fully developed the antlers consist of a main stem or "beam," carrying one or more branches or "tynes." When first pro- duced, in the second year after birth, the antler consists only of the "beam," the animal being then termed a "brocket." The next year a basal branch or "brow- tyne" is developed; it is then termed a "spayed"; and in the following year a second branch or *'tres-tyne," directed forward, appears above the former, the hinder portion of the beam constituting the "royal." Should the antler develop further, it is by the more or less com- plete branching of these tynes; the "royal-tyne" in particular, being very liable to become sub-divided in succes- sive years. The musk-deer and the water-deer of China have no horns. Deer FALLOW DEER are very generally distributed, but none have yet been discovered in either Aus- tralia or South Africa. The largest liv- ing form is the true elk (Alces palmatHs') or moose, while the Indian muntjacs are among the smallest, the chevroatins be- ing now placed in a group by themselves. Except the reindeer {Cervus farandus), no member of the group has been com- pletely domesticated. In the fossil state deer are not found earlier than in the Pliocene period, while the best known extinct form, the Irish deer, or Irish elk, occurs in peat bogs or cave deposits. DEERFIELD, a town of Franklin co., Mass.; on the Connecticut river, and the Boston and Maine and the New York, New Haven and Hartford railroads; 33 20 — Vol. Ill— Cyc