30 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 66 
parts of China, and from other regions in the east. He made this 
material the basis of many technical papers. In all of these he applied 
a standard of specific differentiation so unlike those in use by other 
zoologists that his work could not be understood. Mr. Sowerby 
has been able to make good preliminary reviews of Heude’s bears, 
pigs, and goat-antelopes. Papers on these three important groups 
may be expected to appear in the near future. 
In March Mr. Sowerby returned to the Yangtze. This expedition 
was an almost complete failure. Mr. Sowerby writes (June 10, 
1916): 
My recent trip to Che Kiang was brought to a summary close by the out- 
break of hostilities in that region. I could not get any transport and very 
nearly had my retreat cut off. Nothing can be done now till the provinces have 
come to an agreement as to who shall be president and just how the govern- 
ment is to be run. There is only north Chili left to work in and I hope to go 
there this autumn. China is in such an unsettled state that if it were not for 
the war in Europe it would be attracting everybody’s attention. Conditions 
are no better than they were during the revolution of 1911. 
No specimens collected during 1916 have yet been received from 
Mr. Sowerby. Material from the Yangtze and from several locali- 
ties in northern China is expected soon to arrive. 
GERRIT S. MILLER, JR. 
EXPLORATIONS IN SANTO DOMINGO 
Dr. W. L. Abbott, whose energies for nearly thirty years past 
have been devoted to explorations in the Old World, made a short 
visit to Santo Domingo (the scene of his earliest expedition, in 
1883), where he spent a few weeks in late summer and fall, 1916, at 
the eastern end of the island, chiefly in the vicinity of the Bay of 
Samana, with trips to several localities in the highlands of the 
interior, notably at Constanza and El Rio. On this expedition he 
made a very interesting collection of mammals, birds, reptiles, 
mollusks, insects, and Indian relics. 
In the coast region, Dr. Abbott investigated numerous caves in 
search of remains of an extinct mammalian fauna. The results 
of this part of his work have been described by Mr. Miller (Smith- 
sonian Misc. Coll, Vol. 66, No. 12, December 7, 1916). One of 
the most interesting mammals whose remains were found in these 
caves is a large rodent, described from a freshly killed specimen 
in 1836, but not captured since then. Whether it is extinct or not 
is at present an uncertainty. The skull found by Dr. Abbott is shown 
in figure 38. At San Lorenzo Bay, on the south side of the Bay 
