198 APPENDIX. No. II. 



UNGULATA. 



10. Eangifer tarandus {Linn.) — The reindeer was not 

 actually met with by our Expedition to the northward of 

 Port Foulke, but its newly-shed horns were found in the 

 Valley of the Twin Glacier, Buchanan Strait. I came across 

 a skeleton recently picked by wolves in the neighbourhood 

 of Eadmore Harbour, lat. 80° 27 / N. At various points 

 along the coast of Grinnell Land, further north, we came 

 upon shed antlers, but these may have been of considerable 

 antiquity, whilst Lieutenant Giffard found and brought to 

 the ship a portion of an antler which he picked up in lat. 

 82° 45' N. The horns of a reindeer were found at Thank 

 God Harbour, by one of the 'Polaris' Expedition in June 

 1872. 1 



11. Ovibos moschatus (Zimm.) — The fossil remains of 

 Ovibos found in Siberia, North America, Germany, France 

 and England have been determined by naturalists as iden- 

 tical with the species now found living in the northern 

 regions of the American continent and the northern and 

 eastern shores of Greenland, whilst most of the larger 

 mammalia of the Pleistocene period, with which the musk-ox 

 was associated, have passed away. The musk-ox, being truly 

 an Arctic mammal, doubtless travelled northward as the 

 glacial cold diminished ; but in Europe and Asia it found 

 its limit of withdrawal bounded by the mainlands of the 

 Old World. No trace of it has been discovered in Spits- 

 bergen or Franz Joseph Land ; and the reasonable con- 

 clusion is that the great extent of sea which separates 

 these groups of islands from the continents, formed an in- 

 superable obstacle to its progress in that direction. Doubt- 

 less its remains are to be found in the New Siberian Islands, 

 and there is no valid reason why it should not still inhabit 

 Kellett Land. So far as we know, however, the musk-ox 

 living on the Arctic shores of Asia had no inaccessible re- 



1 Narr. ' Polaris,' North Polar Exp., p. 378 



