298 Prof. A. Nehring on Mjodes lemmus crassidens. 



right under jaw, the fragments of a cranium, and numerous 

 limb-bones, still united by the ligaments, belonging to three 

 distinct skulls. 



Anyone seeing these lemming-remains without knowing 

 their origin would put them down as the recent bones of the 

 common Norwegian species. I have already, in the Sitziings- 

 berichte der Berl. Ges. naturf. Freunde,' 1899, p. 56, stated 

 that they have not the appearance of fossils. I first of all held 

 the opinion that they were to be looked upon as fossils in 

 the ordinary sense of the word, and to be assigned to the 

 Pleistocene period, while I spoke in the above-mentioned 

 ' Sitzungsberichte ' as to the possibility of a race of lemm.ings, 

 hitherto unknown, still livins^ in the Portu":uese mountains, 

 a possibility to which Barrett-Hamilton {op. cit.) had pre- 

 viously alluded. To judge, however, from a letter which the 

 famous zoologist Professor Barboza du Bocage, of Lisbon, 

 most kindly sent in answer to my eixquiry, it appears ex- 

 tremely improbable that any such race of lemmings now 

 exists anywhere in Portugal. Indeed, as Barboza du Bocage 

 has pointed out in his letter, up till now no undoubted fossil 

 remains of lemmings have been found in Portugal ; but this 

 latter circumstance may easily be explained by the fact that 

 up to the present but little attention has been paid there to 

 the remains of such small animals. 



In Germany there are plenty of localities for diluvial 

 animal remains, in which, although excavation has been going 

 on for ten years or more, no traces of lemmings have yet been 

 found or recognized as such — notwithstanding that many 

 remains of lemmings have been found, as I might mention, 

 for instance, in the quarries at Thiede, near Brunswick, in a 

 number of Upper Franconian caves, and a series of other 

 localities. The mud-deposits of the quarries at Thiede 

 have been known since the time of Leibnitz, on account of 

 their richness in diluvial (pleistocene) animal remains and 

 are often visited by collectors. Yet nobody before me had 

 noticed the remains of lemmings. I myself found in these 

 deposits, between 1874 and 1881, hundreds of undoubted 

 remains (especially lower jaws) not only of Myodes lemmus 

 (resp. oheiisis), but also ot Myodes torqjiatus. Also I could 

 mention certain caves in Ui)|)er Franconia and many other 

 localities in Mid-Europe where 1 was the first to find the 

 bones of lemmings (see, for example, my " Uebersicht iiber 

 24 mitteleuropaische Quarliir-Fauncn," in the Zeitschr. 

 d. deutschen geolog. Gesellschaft, 1880, pp. 468-509, and 

 also the ' Zeitschrift,' '' Gaea," 1879, pj). 663, 671, and 

 712-726). 



In course of time I have come across some forty localities 



