146 MAMMALS OF PENNSYLVANIA AND NEW JERSEY. 



European sort." He further states that Bartram, of Philadelphia, told him 

 the Indians were unanimous in saying the red fox was never in the country 

 before the Europeans. In a discussion of the identity of the American and 

 European red foxes in Doughty 's Cabinet of Natural History, 1830, vol. i,. 

 pp. 28, 29, there occurs the following significant allusion to the former 

 absence of the red fox in Perry Co., Pa. : " In 1787 when quite a boy I was 

 at the death of the first Red Fox killed in Perry Co., Pa. Not a person pres- 

 ent, nor any who saw it for some days, had ever seen or heard of an animal 

 of the kind. At last it was shown to a Mr. Lenarton, an old Jerseyman, who 

 pronounced it an English fox. He said the red fox was imported into New 

 York from England by one of the first EngHsh governors, who was said to be 

 a great sportsman, and turned out on Long Island, where they remained for 

 many years but at last made their way on the ice to the mainland and spread 

 over the country." — See American Turf Register and Sporting Magazine, vol. 

 I, p. 74. Such statements as the above should be considered by present-day 

 investigators. The following from Audubon and Bachman is confirmatory of 

 the fact that a large part of the mountainous country inhabited by the red fox 

 in 1850 was destitute of them a hundred years previously : " In the early his- 

 tory of our country the red fox was unknown south of Pennsylvania, that state 

 being its southern hmit. In process of time it was found in the mountains of 

 Virginia, where it has now become more abundant than the gray fox." — 

 Quad. N. Amer., vol. 2, p. 270. In view of these statements and of the fact 

 that European foxes had been introduced into New England, Pennsylvania 

 and Virginia for sporting purposes by the middle of the i8th century (1750),, 

 it looks quite likely that the red foxes mentioned by Kalm as being found in 

 N. J. and Pa. in 1770, also the one found in Perry Co. in 1789 and those de- 

 scribed by Desmarest* as coming from "Virginia" in 1820 were pure 

 descendants of the European red fox. In such a case Vulpes fulvus of 

 course is a synonym of Vulpes vulpes (Linnaeus). Where then was the 

 American red fox in pre-Columbian times? If it was not in Perry Co. in 

 1789, nor in the mountains of Virginia till a much later date, it must have 

 been somewhere in the region north of the Great Lakes or in the Hudson 

 Bay regions, where the Delaware Valley Indians, who talked to Bartram, 

 could not come in contact with it. This was probably the case, and in these 

 regions only are we to seek for specimens to establish the real differences be- 

 tween the two continental forms. No doubt the difficulty of determining the 



* Based on the Renard de Virginie of Palisot de Beauvois, Bulletin de las Societe Philo- 

 mathique, 1800, p. 137. Curiously enough the tenability of V. fulvus Desmarest is further 

 weakened by its only reference, viz, to Beauvois just cited. Beauvois' description is solely^ 

 based on the skull of a gray fox which he compares with that of the European red fox, 

 thinking he had in hand the skull of an American red fox. Desmarest's description of ex- 

 ternal characters was based on a red fox skin, locality not stated. 



