220 Proceedings of Indiana Acadennj of Science 



had been freshly used. W. D. Richardson says he saw a woodchuck 

 as late as the last of October or first of November, 1922. In the dunes 

 I have never seen any evidence of essential damage to plants attributable 

 to them. They certainly are much less destructive than man. It is a 

 pity they do not show themselves oftener than they do. 



Mearn's cottontail (Sylvilagus floridanus mearnsii Allen) : Cotton- 

 tails seem fairly common in the region. I have seen them in nearly every 

 locality except the fore dunes. On two occasions I saw cottontails running 

 from the red osier dogwood and fox grapes near our tent as we were 

 returning late in the afternoon. They may have been attracted by the 

 fox grapes which were trailing over the sand. No specimens were 

 secured. 



Virginia deer {Odocoileus virginiayius Boddaert) : The Virginia 

 deer has been extinct in the region under consideration for many years. 

 H. W. Leman of Chicago, who is much interested in the dunes and owns 

 a large tract of land along the lake front west of Waverly Beach, says 

 that one of his Chicago friends, now dead, told him that when he was 

 a young man there was excellent deer shooting in the dunes. If his 

 friend were living he would be about 75 years of age. One may conclude 

 from this that deer were fairly numerous in the dunes about 1875. 

 They were probably all killed off shortly after that time. If they 

 persisted for ten years longer the date of their disappearance would be 

 only a few years earlier than the last record for Jasper and Newton 

 Counties, 1890 and 1891 according to Butler (4). Their foimer abun- 

 dance in the region is attested by remains which are not infrequently 

 found. In his cottage in the dunes H. W. Leman has a very perfect antler 

 picked up in the sand. Miss Rose Leal of Chicago gave me a nearly 

 complete antler which she had picked up in a blowout. Its length fol- 

 lowing the convexity from burr to broken tip is 320 mm., circumference 

 just above the burr 85 mm. In a blowout adjacent to our camp I found 

 three fragments of antlers not quite so large. With them were various 

 badly weather-worn bones and two molar teeth. Whether all the frag- 

 ments came from one animal cannot be said. In another blowout to 

 the west I picked up two molar teeth and portion of metatarsals and 

 metacarpals and vertebrae. With these evident deer bones were a 

 fragment of lower jaw of a member of the genus Canis, probably a large 

 dog rather than a wolf and the upper end of the femur of possibly a 

 dog. In a blowout near Waverly Beach F. E. Challis collected numerous 

 fragments of deer bones. At the water's edge when the lake was unusually 

 low I picked up an almost perfect left ramus of a deer's mandible. 

 Part of the symphysis is present but none of the incisor or incisor-like 

 teeth, but the cheek teeth are all in place and essentially perfect. 

 The length of this toothrow (alveoli) is 83 mm. The last molar is 

 slightly worn, the teeth anterior to it moderately so. It is said that 

 in the public library of Gary there is a very complete pelvis of a deer 

 found in the dunes by Boy Scouts. 



