4 PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL MUSEUM VOL. 97 
Pennant (1793, p. 148) believed S. flavus to be Indian rather than 
American and recorded it from the “woods near Amadabad, the capitol 
of Guzarat,’”’ India. Humboldt, in describing ‘’écureuil orangé’”’ 
from “Carthagéne” as Sciurus granatensis (1812, p. 8, pl. 3, No. 7, 
figs. 1 and 2),' declared it to be very different from Sciurus flavus. 
The squirrels of the Cartagena region are orangeous or reddish, not 
yellow, and, if anything, the hairs of the back are tipped with black, 
never with white as in flavus. It seems then that granatensis, 
unequivocally from our region, is unquestionably the squirrel of the 
present collection and the same that has been described, subsequently, 
under various specific names. On the other hand, S. flavus Linnaeus 
cannot be identified with any known South American squirrel. 
The next name to be applied to the squirrels of Colombia is Sciurus 
variabilis, proposed by I. Geoffroy St. Hilaire in 1832. Up to the 
time when Allen (1915, p. 251) formally declared S. variabilis to be an 
indeterminable species, authors generally accepted this name as the 
earliest for the medium-sized red squirrels of Colombia and adjacent 
regions. The history of S. variabilis is interesting. Allen, in his 
revision of the Neotropical Sciuridae (1915), refers to most of the 
literature on the subject. However, his presentation of the case, 
leading to the rejection of the name variabilis, appears to be too 
strongly based on his personal opinion and, we may be led to suspect, 
a bias favoring his own conclusions over those of other authors. The 
salient points of the argument may be summarized as follows: 
1. The original description of variabilis appears to be quite ade- 
quate—indeed, much more so than the description of any other 
American squirrel up to the time Alston (1878) revised the group. 
The original series, consisting of three specimens, was collected by 
Plée in Colombia. 
2. Alston (1878, pp. 657, 665) examined the types of variabilis in 
the Paris Museum and concluded that they represented the ‘‘oldest 
name and therefore the one here adopted [for the] red specimens from 
Colombia and strictly synonymous with Gray’s gerrardi.’”’ Among 
other squirrels referred to variabilis, Alston included one from “Santa 
Martha,” or Santa Marta, the old name for the province that was 
later combined with the province of Valledupar to form the present 
department of Magdalena. 
3. Bangs (1898, pp. 183-186) identified squirrels from the Santa 
Marta region, Colombia, as variabilis and restricted the type locality 
to Bonda on the coast. He described S. variabilis saltuensis from the 
Sierra Nevada in the interior. 
4. Allen (1899, p. 216), who was prepared with a name for the 
Bonda squirrel (bondae), objected to Bangs’s conclusions. He did not 
1 The work consulted, a second issue of the Mémoire first published in 1805, fide Sherborn, Ann. Mag. 
Nat. Hist., ser. 7, vol. 3, p. 428, 1899. 
