1891. | NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES. 77 
Two orders of our mammals have received very little atten- 
tion for nearly thirty years, and in respect to them we are at 
present entirely at sea as regards the number of species, their 
relationships, or their correct names. ‘These are the bats, 
which have not been monographed since 1864, and the moles 
and shrews, which have not been thoroughly revised since 1857." 
We are happy to say, however, in respect to the former, that Dr. 
Harrison Allen has a work in press, under the auspices of the 
Smithsonian Institution, relating to the bats, which will give 
us a new and most welcome point of departure for this group. 
The outlook regarding the moles and shrews is less encouraging, 
there being unfortunately no similar work under way treating of 
these groups from the American standpoint. Some yearssince, 
however, Dr. Dobson, of England, undertook a monographic 
revision of the Insectivora of the world, but the third and last 
part, which is to treat of the shrews, has not yet appeared. In 
1874 this same author published a monograph of the bats of 
the world, including, of course, North American. This work 
was a boon to workers in this field, and a great help respecting 
our own bats, though not altogether satisfactory. 
We have now said all that our limited time will permit con- 
cerning the progress of North American mammalogy from the 
bibliographic standpoint ; its progress from the scientific stand- 
point remains to be considered. 
Prior to the Government explorations which yielded the 
material on which Baird’s work was based, we had only the 
most superficial knowledge of the mammalogy of North Amer- 
ica at large, or beyond the more settled parts of the eastern por- 
tion of the United States. No museum, public or private, had 
a good series of specimens of even our most common mammals. 
Species without number had been described, generally in the 
most imperfect manner, from either single or comparatively 
few specimens, and the types had been preserved only in rare 
instances. Almost nothing was known of either seasonal or 
individual variation, nor was the material extant for the study 
of either of these very important phases of the subject. KHven 
Professor Baird, in working up his comparatively abundant 
material from the West, found himself often baffled in his 
comparisons by the absence of specimens from the East. Pro- 
1In 1877 Coues published an important preliminary paper on the 
North American Insectivora, entitled ‘‘Precursory Notes on American 
Insectivorous Mammals, with Descriptions of New Species” (Bull. 
U.S. Geol. Surv., III., 1877, pp. 631-653). He intended to follow this 
with an elaborate monograph of the group, which, however, unfortu 
nately was never completed. 
