INTRODUCTION 7 



ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 



The chief burden of promoting the present investigation, in both 

 a spiritual and a financial sense, was magnanimously assumed in 

 the fir.st place by the late Dr. John C. Phillips, not merely in his 

 capacity as chairman of the American Committee for International 

 Wild Life Protection, but as a more or less personal responsibility. 

 The main lines of the investigation have been carried out as origi- 

 nally planned by him. Other members of the Committee have also 

 made generous contributions of funds, information, and advice. 

 When the magnitude of the task began to exceed all original esti- 

 mates, a grant from the Penrose Fund of the American Philosophical 

 Society provided timely aid. After Dr. Phillips's death in November, 

 1938, a subcommittee, consisting of Dr. Alexander Wetmore, Mr. 

 Charles M. B. Cadwalader, and Mr. Harold J. Coolidge, Jr., by 

 vigorous action found the means for completing the investigation. 



I am further and particularly indebted to Mr. Cadwalader, as 

 director and president of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Phila- 

 delphia, for the provision of desk space and library facilities in 

 this institution. The already great resources of the Academy's 

 library have been considerably augmented, during and in behalf of 

 this investigation, by the acquisition of numerous important works 

 on mammals, through the efforts of Mr. Cadwalader, Mr. Brooke 

 Dolan, II, and Mr. George L. Harrison. 



The whole-hearted cooperation of the International Office for the 

 Protection of Nature in Brussels, and particularly of its Secretary, 

 Mrs. Tordis Graim, is most gladly and gratefully acknowledged. 

 Mrs. Graim has generously undertaken and admirably fulfilled the 

 task not only of distributing questionnaires to numerous zoologists 

 and conservation officials in the Old World, but also of translating 

 and compiling the very valuable data thus obtained. 



Through the courtesy of Dr. H. E. Anthony and Mr. George G. 

 Goodwin, of the American Museum of Natural History, lengthy 

 portions of indispensable works in Russian by Ognev and Nasonov 

 have been translated at that institution and placed in my hands. 

 Thereby a great deal of important information, not generally 

 available to non-Russian zoologists, has been incorporated in the 

 pages of the present work. 



I must not omit to mention the patience and accommodation of 

 Dr. Remington Kellogg, of the United States National Museum, 

 during the hours I have spent in his office, consulting various works 

 not available in Philadelphia. 



No words of mine can add to the value of the drawings produced 

 by the masterful strokes of Earl Poole's pen. They will be appre- 

 ciated by the reader not only as unusually faithful delineations of 



