110 NEW YORK ZOOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 
phere, and food have been greater than this mountain animal 
could overcome. It is to be hoped that methods will yet be de- 
vised by which this noble animal can be enabled to survive and 
breed and become thoroughly acclimated in the Eastern United 
States, and the New York Zoological Society intends to do its 
utmost toward the accomplishment of this result. It is the opin- 
ion of the writer, however, that with Ovis montana success is pos- 
sible with young animals only by having them retained in their 
home country until their development has reached a point well 
along toward maturity, say an age of two years, when the animal 
will have a fund of constitutional strength to draw upon in re- 
sisting the ill-effects of the very radical change in environment 
that is necessary. 
At the present moment the Zoological Society is making an 
organized effort for the capture of specimens of Ovis dalli for 
acclimatization in the New York Zoological Park. It is believed 
that it will prove easier to achieve success with Mountain Sheep 
from the humid climate and low altitude of the Alaskan coast 
than with specimens of Ovis montana from the high and dry 
atmosphere of the Rocky Mountain region. 
In 1888 Dr. George Bird Grinnell secured, in northwestern 
Montana, of a Piegan Indian, a female Mountain Sheep lamb, 
which he forwarded to the Smithsonian Institution for the nucleus 
collection of the National Zoological Park, and which came into 
my care. In Forest and Stream, of June 6, 1889, Dr. Grinnell 
published the following very interesting account of how this 
animal was found and captured: 
“Tt was in the month when they plant potatoes (May) that John and 
two other men drove their wagons up to the mountains to cut timber for 
fence-posts and poles. The prairie was bright and green, and the young 
leaves of willows and aspens were growing, but upon the range the far- 
reaching fields of snow seemed scarcely to have begun to grow smaller, 
and the nights were still cold. The men worked hard, chopping and haul- 
ing; but one day John, thinking that flesh meat was needed, left his axe 
in camp, and, taking his gun instead, started out to hunt. 
“Tt was still early in the day when he reached the foot of the great 
buttress-like shoulder that juts out from the range on the south side of 
the stream. As yet he had seen no game, and no very fresh sign, but here 
he suddenly came on the tracks of two mountain sheep which had passed 
along late the day before, after the surface of the snow, softened at mid- 
day by the rays of the sun, had, as night drew on, begun to freeze again. 
He followed these tracks for some little distance, and at length, as he 
