246 NEW YORK ZOOLOGICAL -SOCRETY: 
which this subject has been treated by writers who have not 
sifted the evidence sufficiently. 
Within the United States the mountain goat is only found in 
Idaho, western Montana, Washington, and Oregon. ‘There is 
no evidence whatever of the white goat having existed in Wyo- 
ming. In examining the rumors respecting the occurrence of goat 
one must remember that only a few years ago very little was 
known about this animal, and few people had seen it. In the 
south, escaped domestic goat and old mountain sheep ewes with 
bleached coats and straight horns, have probably been the basis 
of many such stories. In some places such animals have been 
mistaken for white goat and elsewhere, notably in Alaska, for 
the legendary ibex. Until the discovery and description of Dall’s 
white sheep, in 1884, all white animals in the north were called 
goat and white mountain sheep meat is sold to-day in Dawson 
City restaurants under that name. 
There is no reason whatever to believe that the limits of the 
distribution of the white goat were ever much different from 
what they are now, except in outlying localities along their south- 
ern limits. The center of the greatest abundance of goat appears 
to be in the coast ranges in British Columbia and southern 
Alaska and it is here that they are found low down the moun- 
tain sides and often close to salt water. 
COMPARISON WITH SHEEP. 
It is due to ignorance of the character of the country inhab- 
ited by mountain goat that so much has been written about an 
alleged antipathy between Oreammnos and the mountain sheep. It 
is singular that writers should go so far afield as to conjure up 
an imaginary mutual hatred to account for the undoubted fact 
that sheep and goat seldom live together. In some places, how- 
ever, notably the Schesley Mountains, sheep and goat can be 
found on the same mountain side. Sheep belong to the rugged 
hills and lower slopes and at one time ranged far eastward into 
the plains wherever the character of the country was at all rough, 
as in the Black Hills and in the Bad Lands of the upper Missouri. 
The sheep is furthermore, a grass-eating animal, while the 
goat is a browser, finding his food mainly on the buds and twigs 
of the forests that grow to the very foot of the goat rocks. All 
through the goat country occur patches of forest and it is there 
that the goat is found, between timber-line and the snow fields. 
So far as we know the only grazing done by the goat, beyond 
