120 Bangs — The Cotton Mouse, Pcromyscus Gossypinus. 



from Georgia. The measurements and description of the colors 

 of Wagner's s])ecimen show it to have been a very }■ oung indi- 

 vidual, and now impossible to identify. Wagner gives no defi- 

 nite locality in the State of Georgia, and as P. aureolns is found 

 generally distributed throughout that State and as P. leiicopv.s 

 undoubtedly occurs in the mountains, it would be unwise to 

 assume that the specimen in question was certainly the young 

 of P. gossypinus, and thus allow Wagner's name to stand for that 

 species. 



Two names have been given latcl}^ to subspecies of gossypinus 

 by Mr. Samuel N. Rhoads. One of these, the so-called Sitomys 

 megacephalus, from Woodville, Alal)ama,* becomes a synonym of 

 P. gossy2)inus. I have not seen the type, which is in alcohol, 

 l)ut there are no characters attributed to it that can in any way 

 separate it from true gossypinns of Georgia, an animal Mr. Rhoads 

 was wholly unfamiliar with, he making his comparisons with 

 the Florida form, which is subspecifically distinct. The cranial 

 characters claimed fovmegacepJialus are individual and in nowise 

 diagnostic. The other is the Peromyscus gossypinus mississippien- 

 sis of tlie Iwttom lands of the Mississippi in Tennessee, and is a 

 well-marked race. I now describe two more races, one from the 

 peninsula of Florida, the other from the baj'ou region of Louis- 

 iana, thus dividing P. gossypinus into four subspecies. 



Peromyscus gossypinus has been given by authors in recent 

 years as a subspecies of P. leucopus, not because any intermedi- 

 ates were forthcoming, but on general principles, until Rhoads, 

 in his ' Mammals of Tennessee,' in 189G, gave it full specific 

 rank. Mr. Rhoads, in the summer of 1895, found gossypinus and 

 leucopus in the Mississippi bottoms in Tennessee, Avhere, he saj'^s, 

 it was possible to catch both S2:)ecies in the same trap, and yet 

 the two kept perfectly distinct. This undoubtedly will prove to 

 be the case wherever the ranges of P. leucopus and P. gossypinus 

 overlap. 



Most of the closely related forms of white-footed mice look 

 very different from each other when one is trapping and hand- 

 ling them in the flesh. This ' aspect difference,' as Professor 

 Shaler aptly calls it, is subtle and hard to define, and may dis- 

 appear almost entirely when the animals are made into the con- 

 ventional museum skins or preserved in spirits, thus leaving 

 the characters on which species and subspecies are based very 



*Proc. Acad. Ntit. Sci., Philii., 1894, p. 254. 



