In all respects these deer are admirably adapted to a climate of intense severity and a life for months at a time amid snow and ice. Their coats are of great thickness and density, the hairs growing so close together as to produce a structure recalling much elongated velvet-pile. In the stags the throat is further protected by a fringe or ruff of long hair; and in both sexes the main pair of hoofs is very large and deeply cleft, so as to afford as big a surface as possible to prevent sinking deeply in the snow, while further support is afforded by the unusually large size of the small supplemental pair of hoofs. With these powerful hoofs, reindeer in winter scrape away the snow to uncover the reindeer-moss (_Cladonia rangiferina_), which at this season forms their main or only food-supply. In summer, however, they eat grass and herbage, as well as the buds and young shoots of dwarf birch. [Illustration] The typical representative of the species is the Scandinavian reindeer, the one represented in the illustration, which occurs in both the wild and the domesticated condition. It is a comparatively small animal, with relatively short limbs, and the antlers rounded, and not displaying, as a rule, any very excessive development in the width of one of the lower pair of front tines. In Siberia other and larger, but still imperfectly known, races occur; while in Arctic America the species is represented by two very distinct types, more or less connected by a number of intermediate races. The recently described Finnish race of the reindeer (_Rangifer tarandus fennicus_), now nearly extinct, is a larger animal than its Swedish representative. Of the two chief American types, the most northern is the so-called Barren-ground reindeer or caribou (_R. t. arcticus_), in which the antlers are rounded and of great length, with the basal front tines far removed from those of the terminal extremity; while the woodland reindeer (_R. t. caribu_), on the other hand, has the antlers short, flattened, and with the tines crowded together, very large, and often much branched. In some of these American reindeer one of the lower pair of front tines often attains an enormous width, or depth, and is much branched. There is likewise great racial variation in the matter of colour among American reindeer, the lightest being the Newfoundland _R. t. novæ-terræ_, while the darkest is _R. t. osborni_ of the Cascade Mountains, in which the greater part of the body is chocolate, or even blackish brown.