VA TRANSACTIONS OF THE FEB.23 
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panied by a competent naturalist. Large collections were at the 
same time made by other officers of the army stationed at various 
posts throughout the distant West, and also by the United 
States and Mexican Boundary Survey. Although the collections. 
made by the Boundary Survey were made the subject of a special 
report, they formed alsoa part of the material on which was based 
Baird’s memorable “‘ Eighth Volume,” as this work is familiarly 
known among mammalogists, These collections were, by act of 
Congress, all transmitted to the Smithsonian Institution, and 
were thus brought together as a single collection, to be elab- 
orated, fortunately, by one of the most competent naturalists. 
America has yet produced. 
But the volume under notice was not the sole outcome of these 
various Government surveys. Other volumes of the Pacific 
Railroad Reports contain the special field reports of the various 
naturalists of the different routes surveyed, accompanied by nu- 
merous plates of new or previously unfigured species. These re- 
ports embody the field notes of the collectors, and thus admir- 
ably supplement with biographical matter Baird’s exhaustive 
systematic treatise. Hence to Gambel, Woodhouse, Kennerly, 
Cooper, Gibbs, Suckley, Heermann, Newberry, Trowbridge, and 
Gunnison—names well ingrained in the literature of many de- 
partments of North American natural history—we are deeply 
indebted for much of our information respecting the habits and 
distribution of the mammals of Western North America. 
Since the publication of Professor Baird’s great work in 1857, 
several monographs have appeared treating of particular orders 
or families. In 1864 the Smithsonian Institution published Dr. 
Harrison Allen’s ‘‘ Monograph of the Bats of North America,” 
an octavo of about 1C0 pages, illustrated with numerous wood- 
cuts. This was the first general systematic treatise on North 
American bats since the works of Godman and Harlan, pub- 
lished nearly forty years before, and it remains still our stan- 
dard work on this group, and the only special treatise on the 
North American species of the order. ‘Twenty species are recog- 
nized, and many others referred to as unidentifiable. 
In 1866 Dr. Theodore N. Gill published a ‘‘ Prodrome of a 
Monograph of the Pinnipedes,” giving a systematic synopsis of 
the families, genera, and species of the marine Carnivora—the 
seals and their allies. 
In 1870 I published a monograph of the family Otariide, or 
Eared Seals,’ a paper of 108 pages, with three plates and a num- 
ber of woodcuts, giving a detailed account of their osteology and 
1 Bull. Mus. Comp. Zodl., II., No. 1, 1870, pp. 1-108, pll. i.-iii. 
