Acclimatisation has made some woeful mistakes in New Zealand, for is it not responsible for the rabbit and the house-sparrow, the stoat and the weasel? On the other hand, it has many striking successes to boast of in the shape of birds, beasts, and fishes, which commerce and industry would never have brought to the islands in the regular way of business. Of these, one may select the deer among beasts, the trout among fishes, and the pheasant, quail, and starling among birds. Many colonists, it is true, would include skylarks, blackbirds, and thrushes among the good works for which acclimatising societies have to be thanked; but of late years these songsters have been compassed about with a great cloud of hostile witnesses who bear vehement testimony against them as pestilent thieves. No such complaints, however, are made against the red-deer, the handsomest wild animals yet introduced into New Zealand. Indeed, several provinces compete for the honour of having been their first New Zealand home. As a matter of fact, it would appear that as long ago as 1861 a stag and two hinds, the gift of Lord Petre, were turned out on the Nelson hills. Next year another small shipment reached Wellington safely, and were liberated in the Wairarapa. These came from the Royal Park at Windsor, and were secured by the courtesy of the Prince Consort. In 1871 some Scottish red-deer were turned loose in the Otago mountains near Lakes Wanaka and Hawea. In all these districts the deer have spread and thriven mightily, and it is possible that the herds of the colony now number altogether as many as ten thousand. Otago sportsmen boast of the unadulterated Scottish blood of their stags, whose fine heads are certainly worthy of any ancestry. In the Wairarapa the remarkable size of the deer is attributed to the strain of German blood in the animals imported from the Royal Park. As yet, however, the finest head secured in the colony was not carried by a deer belonging to any of the three largest and best-known shooting-grounds of the islands. It was obtained in 1907 from a stag shot by Mr. George Gerard in the Rakaia Gorge in Canterbury. The Rakaia Gorge herd only dates from 1897, and is still small, but astonishing stories are told of some of its heads. At any rate the antlers of Mr. Gerard’s stag have been repeatedly measured. One of them is forty-seven inches long, the other forty-two inches and a half.