86 Sport and Life. 



experience in the shooting of adult males of this species ever 

 published in Europe. 



Well do I remember my first introduction to a picture of this 

 beast in the quiet halls of the British Museum Library. After 

 writing my ticket for Richardson's Fauna Boreali-Americana, 

 I was duly requested to repair to an inner room,, where two 

 gigantic volumes were brought to me. Of such enormous size 

 are they that they can be opened only on a very large table, and 

 they were conveyed to me on a smoothly-running young railway- 

 truck ! There, amid a bewilderingly ample margin, on a page the 

 size of a dissecting table, I found, not a picture, but a sort of 

 nightmare of the animal. From these works I turned to Ord, from 

 Ord to Gray, from Gray to de Blainville, Hamilton Smith, 

 Raffinesque, Ogilby, Desmarest, Harlan, Sundwall, Fischer, 

 Agassiz, and more than a dozen other authorities, winding up with 

 a second careful perusal of Lewis and Clarke's account of their 

 famous expedition to the Rocky Mountains in the first decade of 

 the present century, and to the remarks by Professor Spencer 

 Baird America's greatest then-living naturalist. 



The result was as puzzling as it was amusing, if levity be 

 permissible in the study of dry science, for I found that, with the 

 only exception of the last-named authority, none of these writers 

 had ever seen either a live or a dead Rocky Mountain " goat," and 

 that some of the earlier writers had built up very elaborate theories, 

 and published long and very scientific accounts of it, on the 

 strength of such exceedingly scanty material as has already been 

 mentioned. I further found that the twenty-three authors who had 

 written about this mysterious beast had given it thirteen different 

 generic names ; and, further, that some ranked it among sheep, 

 others classing it as a goat, some as a deer, while others spoke 

 of it as belonging to the chamois tribe ; only one of the early 

 authorities, i.e., de Blainville, coming to the same, and undoubtedly 

 correct, conclusion at which Professor Baird arrives, i.e., that it 

 belongs to the antelopes with the generic name Aplocerus 

 montanus. English authorities spell the name Haplocerus 



