Few and far between are the traces of Moose horns in Pennsylvania. But they do exist, and probably in some remote farmhouse garret a set or two are still to be found. The writer, when engaged in antiquarian studies along the Blue Mountains accidentally learned of the last known pair. They hung for many years above the front door of Heller's stone tavern, near the Wind Gap, in Northampton County, once the famous pathway of the Moose from Northern to Southerly regions. It was related that Marks John Biddle, a celebrated lawyer of Reading, while stopping at this tavern, when on a horseback journey, noticed the horns, and asked about them of the landlord. Old Jacob Heller obliged his guest by taking them down and letting him measure them. They had a width of 78-1/2 inches and weighed a trifle over 91 pounds. Dr. Hornaday in his "American Natural History" tells of a Moose killed in the Kenai Peninsula, Alaska, in 1903, the antlers and skull of which weighed 93-1/2 pounds. The Record Moose Horns in the Field Columbian Museum, Chicago, weigh about 92 pounds. This Record Moose was taken in the Kenai Peninsula in 1899. The late Captain F. C. Selous (recently killed in battle in British East Africa) stated that the antlers of a Moose which he killed on the McMillan River, Canada, in 1904 had a spread of 66-1/2 inches and weighed 75 pounds. JOHN Q. DYCE (1830-1904), Doubtless the Moose of Colonial days was a much larger animal than any specimens seen today, even the gigantic so-called "Alaskan" Moose. By studying the deterioration of European Red Deer, by the actual measurements of horns in various Continental collections and actual weights recorded in old-time sportsmen's note books, during the past three hundred years from antlered giants to puny runts, it is doubtless the same with our Moose. Like the Red Deer of Europe, the Moose of America is hunted ruthlessly for exceptional heads, and is no longer troubled by wolves which formerly pulled down the weakly and imperfect specimens; result a sure deterioration. That the predatory animals do not deteriorate in size is proved by the fact that fossil bones of wolves discovered in England are not any larger than those of European wolves of the present day. The Wind Gap moose horns were taken, Heller said, from a Moose which had been driven by dogs at a trot through the Gap, and at the Easterly end it had staggered and fallen to the roadway from exhaustion. A farmer named Adam Gross got an improvised rope and tackle, and swung the huge brute, which he averred weighed at least a ton, into his barn. It lived only a week, despite all manner of attentions devoted to it. The dead Moose was propped up astride of a fodder-shocker and exhibited in Gross's barn as long as the cold weather lasted. Heller remarked that there was another set of Moose horns on the out-kitchen of Eckhard's |