TWELFTH ANNUAL REPORT. 133 



interesting and harmless. There are now two plants on Van- 

 couver Island very profitably engag-cd in killing whale of all 

 sizes and converting them into fertilizer. A new plant has just 

 been established near Juneau, where whales are especially abun- 

 dant. It would be an easy matter to protect these animals, 

 especially with the co-operation of the Canadian authorities, 

 throughout the inland passages and oceanward as far as the three 

 mile limit. Protective legislation of this sort should be urged. 



Fossils. — In any review of the present game conditions of the 

 vast territory comprised within the district of Alaska and the 

 Canadian Territory of the Yukon, a few remarks on the former 

 occurrence of related forms are not without interest. 



Bones of large extinct mammals, more or less fossilized, occur 

 in abundance throughout the entire valley drained by the Yukon 

 River from Dawson down, and in the valleys of the Colville and 

 Porcupine Rivers, and in still greater abundance on the Seward 

 Peninsula, that projection of Alaska which reaches to within 

 sixtv miles of Siberia. Throughout this enormous area remains 

 of the mammoth and bison occur in such numbers as to indicate 

 former herds of great size. \\''e find also a smaller number of 

 remains of horses, sheep, and at least two species of musk-ox, 

 together w^ith a deer closely related to our wapiti. Teeth of 

 mastodon, although very rare as compared with those of the 

 mammoth, indicate the former existence of that animal. It is 

 perfectly evident that in times comparatively recent, from a 

 geological point of view, perhaps from lo.ooo to 25,000 years 

 ago, Alaska had a fauna of large mammals not altogether dis- 

 similar to existing animals of North America and northern Asia. 

 The mastodon and mammoth, of course, no longer exist on this 

 continent, but the latter is little more than a hairy relative of the 

 Indian elephant thoroughly fitted to meet boreal conditions, and 

 the horses m Alaska were probably not unlike the wild Prjevalsky 

 horses of Asia to-day. 



The ancient Alaskan deer were probabl}- related to the wapiti, 

 which swarmed over our American plains within the memory of 

 living man, and the fossil remains of caribou and moose do not in- 

 dicate any great departure from the living forms of those animals. 



Sheep still occur abundantly in Alaska, and the musk-ox, while 

 no longer found in Alaska, inhabits the no less inhospitable re- 

 gions of the Barren Grounds of Xorth America and the land 

 masses lying still further north. 



Bison skulls are quite common, and indicate an animal much 

 larger, but probably ancestral to our living bufifalo. The history 



