0/ 



■extinction llio prairii' wolf, Canix lalninx, of whit'li in hoyhooil 1 sliot one an«l 

 trapped one ; tlu' otter, the mink, ai.d the raccoon; also the black squirrel, the 

 pinnated grouse, the partridge and the (juail. As a citizen of Lake County I may 

 say, with most of them we dislike to part. We had them, some of them hy tlie 

 thousands, once, hut now they are rapidly disappearing. Yet, notwithstamliiig 

 iiur fourteen railroads, our thirty towns and villages, with their constant hum of 

 business, and our thousands of farms, we still have of mammals, birds and rep- 

 tiles, of l)()th vertebrates and invertebrates, quite a rich fauna left for the study of 

 •childliood and youth, for the investigations of the naturalist; but very little now 

 for the sportsman, the hunter, or the trapper, where, according to the estimate of 

 K. W. Dinwiddle, "250,000'" wild fowls have been shot in ii single season, and 

 some sixty thousaiul musk rats have been traj)ped in a single year; where a 

 thousand ducks have Iteen in one sportsman's house at one time; where the wild 

 geese have been almost by the million, but where along our southern marsh they 

 make their nests no more. 



.\11 these that I have named are becoming so rapidly extinct that they will 

 Soon no longer form a part of our fauna, and Lake County will lose its former 

 renown as the sportsman's paradi.«e. 



Tin: Synonymy of thk Ohio River Unionid.k. Uy R. Ei>ls\vokth C.'Vli,. 



[Abstract.] 

 The Ohio River is the original source of most of the earlier described Unio- 

 nidse of North .\merica. The French explorers collected these forms and sent 

 them to Europe, .\mong naturalists there, who described these collections, was 

 J>amarck, who thus becomes the original source of information. Later Say, 

 RaKnesque, Conrad, Barnes and Lea severally studied the I'nios collected in the 

 Ohio and gave different names to the same forms. There has resulted a confusion of 

 specific names that has greatly retarded a correct understanding of the shells of 

 this river. This paper redescribes the shells of sucli species as are imperfectly 

 known, gives the syiu^nymy of the several fcums, has complete bibliographic refer- 

 ences to original publications and illustrations, and has full notes on the geo- 

 graphic distribution of the several forms throughout tin- drainage basin of the 



nhi,.. 



An atteuqii at a natural grouping has also bieii made. An early — the earliest 

 described — form has been made the type of the .several divisions which are to be 

 taken, not as sub-generic divisions, but as arbitrary morphologic sections, each of 

 which will iiulinle forms that are closely alike in e.s.sential details. Through this 

 irrfniping tlu- facts lead to a rather extensive synonymy. 



