72 TRANSACTIONS OF THE [fEB. 23, 



all the species. For the date of publication the work is one of 

 high merit and may yet be consulted with much profit. 



In 1829 appeared an exceedingly important work on North 

 American mammals, namely, the first volume of Kichardson's 

 *' Fauna Boreali-Americana," a quarto of 300 pages and 24 

 plates, on the mammals of British North America. It is still a 

 standard work, and is the chief source of information on the 

 habits and distribution of the mammals of the region north of 

 the United States. 



Among later important works of a general or faunal character 

 may be mentioned Emmons' "Eeport on tlie Quadrupeds of 

 Massachusetts," published in 1840; and DeKay^s "Eeporton the 

 Mammals of the State of New York," a quarto volume with 

 thirty-three colored plates, published in 1842. This work in- 

 cludes references to all of the then known species of North 

 American mammals, and served for many years as a general refer- 

 ence work, though it failed to take very high rank as an author- 

 ity. Linsley'slistof the mammals of Connecticut ^ was published 

 in 1842 ; Thompson published a valuable fully annotated list of 

 the mammals of Vermont ° in 1853; and Kennicott published 

 an important paper on the mammals of Illinois in 1857.^ 



The great work of Audubon and Bachman, entitled "The 

 Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America," published in three 

 volumes, royal octavo, 181G-54, with colored plates, marks a 

 new era in North American mammalogy. About 200 species 

 are described and 160 figured. The work, however, does not 

 include either the bats or the marine species. It is devoted 

 especially to the life histories of the mammals, and deals only to 

 a limited extent with technical matters. Strange as it may 

 seem, this forms the latest general work on North American 

 mammals which treats of the subject from its popular or non- 

 technical side, although one or two later works treat certain 

 groups from a general standpoint, dealing with both the popular 

 and the systematic phases of the subject. Audubon drew most 

 of the platesof the great work with which his name is associated, 

 and jointly with Bachman contributed largely to the text; but the 

 strictly systematic portion is well known to be the work of Bach- 

 man, the father of systematic mammalogy in America, and, prior 

 to Baird, the leading authority on the subject. His monographic 

 revision of the genera Sorex, Scalops, Sciurus, and Lepus, form- 



' American Journal of Science and Arts, XLIII., 1842, pp. 345-354. 



' Natural History of Vermont, 1853, Mammals, pp. 23-56, and App. 

 pp. 11-20. 



^ Report Commissioner of Patents, Agriculture, 1856, pp. 52-110, pU. 

 v.-xiv. 



