402 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 192 8 



have the series of 51 numbers of North American Fauna founded by 

 Merriam in 1889 and issued at irreg:ular intervals by the United 

 States Department of Agriculture ; under the direction of the Smith- 

 sonian Institution many important monographs and papers have 

 appeared in the Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge, the 

 Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections, and the Proceedings and 

 Bulletins of the United States National Museum; finally the Bi- 

 ological Society of Washington has provided a convenient medium 

 for issuing short papers in its proceedings. Next in importance 

 among American publications have been those issued by the Ameri- 

 can Museum of Natural History in New *York — Bulletins, Memoirs, 

 and Novitates. Contributions have appeared in many other places, 

 notably in Berkeley, Cambridge, Chicago, and Philadelphia, but 

 the essential part of the recent history of American mammalogy has 

 been written and printed in Washington and New York. In Eng- 

 land publication has centered in the Annals and Magazine of Natural 

 History and the Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London, 

 serials which have been issued in unbroken line for a century. In 

 Germany most of the important work has appeared in the Sitzungs- 

 berichte naturforschende Freunde zu Berlin and in Wiegmann's 

 Archiv f iir Naturgeschiehte. Other media of publication have been 

 the Arkiv for Zoologi in Stockholm, the Videnskabelige Meddelelser 

 fra Dansk Naturhistorisk Forening, and E. Museo Lundii in Copen- 

 hagen, Notes from the Leiden Museum in Holland, Annales du Musee 

 du Congo Beige in Belgium, Boletin de la Real Sociedad Espanola 

 ' de Historia Natural in Spain, Atti della Societa Italiana di Scienze 

 Naturali, and Annali del Museo Civico di Storia Naturale di Genova 

 in Italy, the official publications of the museums in Tiflis and St. 

 Petersburg, the Bulletin of the Russian Academy of Science, the 

 Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society, and the Journal of 

 the Federated Malay States Museum, in Kuala Lumpur. Three 

 special periodicals are now devoted to the subject of mammalogy: 

 the Journal of Mammalogy, issued by the American Society of 

 Mammalogists, the Zeitschrift fiir Siiugetierkunde published by the 

 Deutsche Gesellschaft fiir Saugetierkunde, and the Revue Frangaise 

 de Mammalogie, one of the official organs of the Societe 

 Ornithologique et Mammalogique de France. 



IV 



The beginning of mammalogy dates from the middle of the 

 eighteenth century. At that time two naturalists, Linnaeus in 

 Sweden and Brisson in France, gathering together and summing up 

 the knowledge of vertebrates which had been accumulated during 

 two and a half centuries of world exploration, laid the foundation 



