PROPOSED EXPLORATIONS AND INVESTIGATIONS 257 



Society, during which there were adduced many general observa- 

 tions tending to substantiate such a claim, but very little positive- 

 evidence for or against. This is equally true of zoology, botany, 

 paleontology, and geology. The tendency was to regard Bering 

 strait as the probable route ; yet it must not be overlooked that so 

 prominent an authority as Dr. Henry Woodward, as lately as 1894^, 

 could state with regard to the points brought out by Dr. George 

 M. Dawson, in a paper then under discussion, that he regarded 

 Dawson's paper as proving that the Aleutian islands are the old 

 high road for the mammoth and other mammals from Asia into 

 North America in Pleistocene times (Quart. Jour. Geol. Soc, Vol. 

 L, Feb., 1894, p. 9). In looking for the evidence of this, one is struck 

 by the extremely meager details upon which such sweeping generali- 

 zations are based, as well as by the uncertainty of even these few 

 facts. Thus the mainstay of Dr. Woodward's contention is a record 

 of a few bones of mammoth having been found by "some men, prob- 

 ably Russian promyshleniks," on Unalaska Island in 1801. 



(b) Japan. — The fauna and flora of the outlying islands and 

 peninsulas of northeastern Asia is fully as much a key to the situa- 

 tion there as that of Great Britain, Scandinavia, and Spain is to 

 similar problems in Europe. If we had the material to properly in- 

 terpret the present and past distribution of life in the Chukchi 

 peninsula, Kamchatka, the Kurils, Sakhalin, and the Japanese islands 

 we might easily trace the history of the migrations of the land ani- 

 mals in that part of the world and the expansion of the Asiatic fauna 

 and flora into the northern portion of our own continent. But no 

 such material is at hand. The U. S. National Museum probably 

 has the best collection of Japanese birds, and one of the present 

 writers has devoted years to its study, and pubHshed numerous 

 papers upon details of Japanese ornithology ; but lack of means has 

 prevented the completion of the work, for which a large amount of 

 manuscript has been accumulated, but never published, simply be- 

 cause he has been unable to secure the necessary material. He has 

 also in hand an extensive work on the herpetology of those regions, 

 which is well under way toward completion; but it can only be re- 

 garded as a preliminary reconnaissance, the material being too frag- 

 mentary for an exhaustive treatise, though based upon the two 

 largest collections of the kind, those of the U. S. National Museum 

 and of the Imperial University in Tokyo. Our knowledge of the 

 Japanese mammals is even less advanced than it was seventy years 

 ago, and there is absolutely no material in any museum. Large por- 

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