64 EXTINCT AND VANISHING MAMMALS 



the southwestern race frondator, which, however, is paler in 

 color. Rhoads describes the type as bright hazel above, with 

 seal-brown underfur, the hinder back shading into bright hazel 

 to cinnamon-rufous and tawny-olive; ears blackish, feet bister. 

 Below, dark broccoli brown, the tips of the longer hairs wood 

 brown. Total length, 1,130 mm.; tail, 279 by 158; hind foot, 

 184. The skull is characterized by its short, broad nasals and 

 short rostrum, with the former scarcely or not extending back 

 of the level of the orbits. 



The limits of the range of this race, though in general from 

 northern Florida to the Mississippi and northward to the low- 

 lands of New Jersey and Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, will 

 probably never be exactly definable since it is now extinct 

 over the greater part of the area and but few complete speci- 

 mens are extant. Rhoads believed that it intergraded with 

 typical C. canadensis in southern New Jersey and the lower 

 parts of Pennsylvania, and Cory (1912), in his map of the 

 range, included southern Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois in the 

 area of presumed intergradation. Lyon (1936), who figures an 

 imperfect skull as the only one extant from Indiana, assumes 

 that it was probably the form occurring in that State. 



Rhoads believed that by 1700 beavers had been practically 

 exterminated from the lowlands of the Delaware, Schuylkill, 

 and Susquehanna Valleys, which were the regions first settled ; 

 while by the time of the American Revolution, they were 

 practically wiped out from all the lowland valleys of Pennsyl- 

 vania except the northern tributaries of the Ohio; but of this 

 there is almost no definite record. In New Jersey, owing to 

 the inaccessible and unproductive character of the lands in 

 the southern part of the State, beavers persisted longer, in the 

 most retired swamps of Atlantic and Cape May Counties, but 

 were probably quite gone by 1830, or earlier. Traces of their 

 old dams persisted for many years later, and Dr. Witmer 

 Stone, writing in 1908, mentions remains of a very large one 

 that he had visited on the Nescochaque branch of Mullica 

 River. In 1900, according to Dr. Stone (1908), there was a 

 colony of beavers in Sussex County, N. J., due apparently to 

 individuals that had escaped from a private preserve where 

 they had been introduced. 



Atwater's " History of Ohio," published in 1838, speaks of 

 beavers as formerly common on the headwaters of the larger 



