ZOOLOGY. 47 



localities, and its characteristic track observed in almost every place to which game resorted to 

 drink. It is, however, less abundant on the Pacific slope than is the eastern species in most 

 parts of the valley of the Mississippi ; being confined to the wooded districts, and found most 

 abundantly in the foot hills of the Sierra Nevada, in California. Considerable numbers are sold 

 in the San Francisco market, to be eaten, commanding a price of from one to three dollars each. 

 I could not learn that the skin was ever made an article of traffic in California. I saw a number 

 of raccoons in confinement in San Francisco, all of which exhibited precisely the movements, 

 the habits, the attitudes, and the temper of the eastern raccoon, and I noticed no striking 

 peculiarity of form or color. 



Specimens were obtained in the San Francisco market. 



URSUS HORRIBILIS, r d . 



Grizzly Bear. 



Ursus horribilis, ORD, Guthrie s Geography, 2d Am. Ed. II, 1815, 291, 299. 



BAIRD, Gen. Rep. Mammals, 1857, 219. 



Ursus ferox, (&quot; LEWIS & CLARK,&quot;) RICHARDSON, F. B. A. I, 1829, 24 ; pi. i. 

 Ann. & BACH, N. A. Quad. Ill, 1853, 141 ; pi. cxxxi 



SP. CH. Size very large. Tail shorter than ears. Hair coarse, darkest near the base, with light tips. An erect mane 

 between the shoulders. Feet very large ; fore claws twice as long as the hinder ones. A dark dorsal stripe from occiput to 

 tail, and another lateral one on each side along the flanks, obscured and nearly concealed by the light tips ; intervals be 

 tween the stripes lighter. All the hairs on the body brownish-yellow or hoary at tips. Region around ears dusky ; legs 

 nearly black. Muzzle pale, without a darker dorsal stripe. 



To the westward of the Rocky mountain range, the grizzly bear seems to have appropriated 

 to himself the southern of our Pacific provinces, leaving the more northern territories to his less 

 powerful congeners, the black and brown bears. The reasons for this peculiar distribution of 

 species are not very obvious, but it is evidently an exhibition of that system in nature which 

 provides by giving a wide range of habit to the different animals for the development of a large 

 amount of animal life in every important division of the almost infinitely varied surface of the 

 earth. That the habitat of the grizzly is not determined by temperature we know, for his thick 

 and shaggy coat affords a better defence against cold than the finer and thinner fur of the black 

 bear, and in the Rocky mountains the range of the grizzly extends at least as far north as the 

 line of the British possessions. 



Differences in the food of the two species, where the food is so nearly identical, seem hardly 

 adequate to account for their distribution. It appears to me rather to turn on the more sylvan 

 habit of the black bear, his greater aptness at climbing, and his evident preference for a country 

 covered by a heavy growth of timber. He is the bear of the forest, while the grizzly is the bear 

 of the &quot; chapparal ;&quot; the latter choosing an open country, whether plain or mountain, whose 

 surface is covered with dense thickets of &quot; manzanita,&quot; or scrub oak which furnish him with 

 his favorite food and clumps of service bushes and low cherry, and whose streams are bordered 

 by tangled thickets of grape vines and wild plum. 



Whatever the cause, the fact is unquestionable, that west of the Rocky mountains the grizzly 

 bear becomes very rare after passing the parallel of 42. They are rather unpleasantly abundant 

 in many parts of the Coast Range, and Sierra Nevada, in California, where large numbers are 

 annually killed by the hunters, and where not a few of the hunters are annually killed by the 

 bears. About Shingletown and McCumber s flat, northeast of Fort Reading, and around the 



