HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN BADGER. 277 



Suppl. pi. 49. The habitat is given as '' Labrador to Hudson's 

 Bay". But there is grave reason to doubt that Buffon's animal, 

 which furuished the material for his and Schreber's plate, came 

 from Labrador, as implied in Gmelin's name. This point was 

 brought up by Richardson, who, quoting Buffon's words "qu'il 

 venoit du pays des Esquimaux", adds, "but in fact it may 

 have been brought actually from the banks of the Saskatche- 

 wan by some of the Canadian fur hunters. " In this uncer- 

 tainty, it is fortunate that Gmelin's name, most probably ob- 

 jectionable on the score of geographical inapplicability, is also 

 anticipated in point of date. Gmelin's diagnosis is also incor- 

 rect, for it seems that his phrase "palmis tetradactjiis" arose 

 in the circumstance that Buffon's specimen had accidentally 

 lost one of its fore toes. 



Early in the present century, the Badger attracted the atten- 

 tion of Lewis and Clarke, being then as now extremely abundant 

 in the regions traversed by these intrepid explorers. Under 

 the curious name of "braro", the animal is fully described by 

 them in the narrative of their journey, published under the 

 editorship of Paul Allen in 1814, for the first time, and in many 

 subsequent editions. This word " braro" is obviously a corrupt 

 rendering of the French ''blaireau", like "brairo", by which 

 name the animal was known to the Canadian voyageurs; the 

 orthography is corrected in the McVickar edition. It is curious 

 to trace the further typographical mangling of this word, 

 originally written wrong by the travellers, being phonetically 

 rendered according to the sound which caught their ears. It 

 is spelled "brarow" or ''prarow" in the Journal of Gass, one 

 of their companions; and "braibo" is found in Gerrard's work 

 above cited.* The animal described by Lewis and Clarke fur- 

 nished Harlan, in 1825, with the basis of a nominal species, 

 Meles jeffersoniij considered distinct from M. Jahradoria, which 

 is also given by this author. 



In 1823, Thomas Say treated of this species, under the name 

 of Taxus lahradoricus ; and the same year Mr. Sabine gave us 

 a detailed and the first satisfactory account of the actual differ- 

 ences in external characters between the American and Euro- 

 pean Badgers. His comparison was transcribed by Sir John 

 Richardson, in the Fauna Boreale-Americana, 1829. The latter 



*Tbc old Mexican name of the southern Bad;;er, said to be rendered "Tla- 

 coyotl" by Fernandez, has suffered as 1 ally, Ijeini; rendered "Laeyotl" and 

 '' Flacoyole" by some late writers. 



