SOME NEW BOOKS 



Pocket Gophers. 



Monographic Revision of the Pocket Gophers, Family Geomyidas (exclusive 

 of the species of Thomomys). By Dr. C. Hart Merriam. North American 

 Fauna, no. 8; Published by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Washington. 

 8vo. Pp. 258, with 19 plates, 4 maps, and frontispiece. 1895. 



This valuable monograph is one of the results of the new methods of 

 collecting and working at Mammalia now universal in America. 

 These methods were originally introduced by the author of the 

 present work, and by his energy and remarkable powers of field- as 

 well as cabinet-work, he has revolutionised the whole study of 

 Mammals in that country, and has shown to what a degree of refine- 

 ment the science of Mammalogy may be brought. Starting as a 

 private collector and observer of animals' habits, he soon perceived 

 the great ignorance of the exact characters and distribution of small 

 mammals which then prevailed, and set himself to remove it by 

 organising a proper system of collecting. Of this system the essential 

 points were that large numbers of specimens should be collected, 

 that these should all be made up exactly like each other on a regular 

 plan, that each should have its skull attached, and that the measure- 

 ments of every individual taken in the flesh should be recorded. 



Hardly had Dr. Merriam commenced work on these lines than 

 he was appointed Chief of the United States Department of Agri- 

 culture, in whose province the study of small mammals (sad to say, 

 mostly noxious) naturally falls, and by the energetic use of his 

 widened powers he has accumulated in the Department, as a supple- 

 mentary collection to that of the United States National Museum, a 

 series of some 50,000 skins of North American mammals — a number 

 perfectly incredible to naturalists of the old type, by whom one or 

 two examples from each of a few widely-separated localities were 

 generally thought to be sufficient to exemplify the range and 

 characters of a species. 



Turning, for example, to the Pouched Gophers included in this 

 monograph, Geomys in its old sense, we should be very much sur- 

 prised if all the European Museums together contain sixty specimens 

 (our own National Museum has thirty-four), while Dr. Merriam in 

 writing his work has had for study "upwards of 800 specimens belong- 

 ing to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, supplemented by 

 no specimens from my private collection, and a number from the 

 U.S. National Museum, making a total of about a thousand speci- 

 mens, among which are by far the greater number of types known 

 to be extant." 



The book itself (for though called a paper it is really a book) con- 

 sists roughly of two parts, one general and the other systematic. In 

 the first a full account is given of the Geomyidae in general, their 

 structure and habits, the descriptions of these latter being based partly 

 on field notes and partly on observations made on a living specimen 

 kept in captivity by the author. 



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