Vol. IX, pp. 99-104 April 14, 1894 



PROCEEDINGS 



OF THE 



BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON 



SYNAPTOMYS COOPERII BAIRD IN EASTERN MAS- 



SACIIUSSETTS; WITH NOTES ON SYNAPTOMYS 



STONEI RHOADS, ESPECIALLY AS TO 



THE VALIDITY OF THIS SPECIES. 



BY OUTRAM BANGS, BOSTON, MASS. 



Ever since I began to trap small mammals in the modern im- 

 proved manner, I have been on the lookont for this species and 

 so was not surprised to find, on June 9th, 1893, a fine adult 

 female*in one of my traps. The trap was set in an old cranberry 

 bog that had been allowed to run out, and had grown up to 

 clumps of Viburnum and Vaccinium bushes, and under these, 

 grasses and sphagnum and carices had crowded out the cran- 

 berry vines to a considerable extent. It was in the middle of the 

 Plymouth woods, about seven miles from the town of Wareham, 

 Plymouth County, Mass. The ground was traversed in every 

 direction by the run-ways of Arvicola ripar'ms and in one of 

 these run-ways I caught the Si/iiaptoviys. She was nursing young 

 at the time, although repeated trapping in the same bog yielded 

 nothing but innumerable Arvicolas, a Zapus Jiudsomas or two, 

 and a few Evotomys gapperi. 



I now had a slight notion of the sort of place to look for 

 Synaptomys in, and tried all such localities I could find without 

 success until September 21, 1893, when in an almost precisely 

 similar bog about six miles distant from the first place, in the 

 township of Wareham, I caught an adult female, also nursing, 

 and in an Arvicola run-way; and on September 24, an adult 



