22 NORTH AMERICAN MUSTELID^.. 



invent the certainl}' erroneous explanation that the animal lays 

 up a store of provisions in its domicile, as if it drove a trade in 

 grain. Dietenbach's derivation from the Celtic, originally Cym- 

 ric, word blaicr^ gniy, seems to me to be nearer the mark ; it 

 would then be " the little gray beast "; and it is corroborative 

 of this that the animal is called, in Picardy, grisard; in Sweden 

 and Denmark, graving or grofling, that is to say, GrauVuig, " a 

 gray or grizzly beast". But the proper Celtic name of the ani- 

 mal is broc; in the Gaelic, Irish, and Bretonic remarkably like 

 tlie Danish hrok, and somewhat similar to borsuk, which prevails 

 in Poland, Eussia, and Siberia ; there this name for the Badger 

 is current among the Bashkirs, Kirghiz, and Buchares, aud is 

 rendered borz by the Magyars; so we may consider it a primitive 

 Turanian word, the more so since the South Sclavonic uses an- 

 other term, in Carniola, jo2«rec or jasbez ; in Bohemia, gezwec. 

 The Wallachian, jezure or esurcy which has been incorrectly con- 

 sidered as from the Latin esor^ eater, is probably related. 



YiELFRASS [Giijo luscus]. — According to the latest investi- 

 gatTons, the CiTuFton inhabited Middle Europe nearly to the 

 Alps, in the period of the Lake-dwellers {Pfahlbauten, literally 

 pile-buildings), together with the Reindeer; and of its occur- 

 rence in Germany, even in the last century, t^wo cases are given, 

 one at Frauenstein in Saxony, by Klein, 1751, the other at 

 Helmstiidt in Brunswick, by Zimmermann, 1777, both, unfor- 

 tunately, without the particulars. Though both these zoolo- 

 gists saw the stufted specimen, neither gives the date of cap- 

 ture, the first only stating that it occurred under Augustus II, 

 who died in 1733. These can only have been stray specimens, 

 since no contemporaneous or previous writer mentions the oc- 

 currence of the animal in Germany. The species was entirely 

 unknown in the Middle Ages, making its first appearance in 

 literature through Michow, a physician of Cracow (de Sarma- 

 tia Asiana et Europtea, 1532), as Lithuanian and Moscovitic, 

 and through Bishop Olaus Magnus, of Upsala, 1562, as an ani- 

 mal of North Sweden, thus nearly at the limit of its present 

 distribution. What we can gather from the name of the ani- 

 mal accords perfectly with this. In Europe, names are only 

 found in the vernacular proper of Scandinavia and Russia, jar/" 

 or jerv of the former, and rossomal'a of the latter, both of which 

 are given by the above-mentioned historians; all German, 

 French, Latin, and such, are book-names, intended to denote 



