22 NEW YORK ZOOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 



which this subject has been treated by writers who have not 

 sifted the evidence sufficiently. 



Within the United States the mountain goat is only found in 

 Idaho, western Montana, Washington, and Oregon. There is 

 no evidence whatever of the white goat having existed in Wyo- 

 ming. In examining the rumors respecting the occurrence of goat 

 one must remember that only a few years ago very little was 

 known about this animal, and few people had seen it. In the 

 south, escaped domestic goat and old mountain sheep ewes with 

 bleached coats and straight horns, have probably been the basis 

 of many such stories. In some places such animals have been 

 mistaken for white goat and elsewhere, notably in Alaska, for 

 the legendary ibex. Until the discovery and description of Ball's 

 white sheep, in 1884, all white animals in the north were called 

 goat and white mountain sheep meat is sold to-day in Dawson 

 City restaurants under that name. 



There is no reason whatever to believe that the limits of the 

 distribution of the white goat were ever much different from 

 what they are now, except in outlying localities along their south- 

 ern limits. The center of the greatest abundance of goat appears 

 to be in the coast ranges in British Columbia and southern 

 Alaska and it is here that they are found low down the moun- 

 tain sides and often close to salt water. 



COMPARISON WITH SHEEP. 



It is due to ignorance of the character of the country inhab- 

 ited by mountain goat that so much has been written about an 

 alleged antipathy between Oreamnos and the mountain sheep. It 

 is singular that writers should go so far afield as to conjure up 

 an imaginary mutual hatred to account for the undoubted fact 

 that sheep and goat seldom live together. In some places, how- 

 ever, notably the Schesley Mountains, sheep and goat can be 

 found on the same mountain side. Sheep belong to the rugged 

 hills and lower slopes and at one time ranged far eastward into 

 the plains wherever the character of the country was at all rough, 

 as in the Black Hills and in the Bad Lands of the upper Missouri. 



The sheep is furthermore, a grass-eating animal, while the 

 goat is a browser, finding his food mainly on the buds and twigs 

 of the forests that grow to the very foot of the goat rocks. All 

 through the goat country occur patches of forest and it is there 

 that the goat is found, between timber-line and the snow fields. 

 So far as we know the only grazing done by the goat, beyond 



