100 THE COMMON FOX. 



this variety is represented in our Plate XXIV. ; but specimens may be 

 met with which are entirely black or entirely grey. 



Thus the American Fox varies rather more than the European one ; 

 and when we consider how great and how parallel these variations are, 

 and how impossible it is, so far as we can see, to detect any cranial or 

 dental characters to distinguish the American Fox from the Fox of the 

 Old World, we cannot hesitate to unite them under one title, that 

 of Canis vulpes *. A statement of Audubon strongly confirms this 

 judgment. He says of the Red Fox : " The young are covered, 

 for some time after they are born, with a soft woolly fur, quite unlike 

 the coat of the grown animal, and generally of a pale rufous colour. 

 Frequently, however, the cubs in a litter are mixed in colour, there 

 being some red and some black cross Foxes together ; when this is the 

 case it is difficult to tell which are the red and which the cross Foxes 

 until they are somewhat grown." F. Cuvier has given a plate of two 

 young 30 days after birth, the offspring of parents of the red variety, 

 clothed in grey down like the underfur of the adult ; in them the red 

 colour began first to appear about the head. That estimable American 

 zoologist Mr. J. A. Allen f not only considers the European and 

 American Foxes to be of one species, but declares the three American 

 varieties to differ in nothing save different degrees of melanism. 



Auduboriis of opinion that the American Fox has gradually extended 

 its range southwards }. According to him Pennsylvania was once its 

 southern limit. Next it made a home in the mountains of Virginia. A 

 few years afterwards it appeared in the more elevated portions of North 

 Carolina, and finally in Georgia, where he had observed it about 1850. 

 The species is said to have been first seen in Lincoln county, Georgia, 

 in 1840. A Mr. Beile informed Audubon that " as he was using a 



* Baird, in his ' Mammals of North America,' p. 130, remarks on the fact that no 

 remains of the Fox have been detected among the fossils derived from the Carlisle and 

 other hone-caves, although C. virginianus is abundantly represented. This, as he says, 

 would lend colour to the idea that the Fox, like the existing American horse, is an immi- 

 grant from the Old "World. 



t See ' Bulletin of the Museum at Harvard College,' vol. i. p. 159. 



% Op, cit. vol. ii. p. 207. 



