SOUTH AMERICA 391 



tint has been used in wearing apparel, first by the Incas and 

 other native peoples of the southern Andes and later by Euro- 

 peans. The former likewise utilized the long hair for weaving 

 into cloth and the flesh was highly regarded as food (Ashbrook) . 

 When the fur was introduced by dealers to the European 

 trade, it became highly prized and much sought after. The 

 price in recent decades has been so high and the animals 

 themselves have become so reduced that naturalists have 

 found it difficult to assemble sufficient series to determine the 

 limits of geographic variation, so that the definition of races 

 has been to this day unsatisfactory. A recent writer (Prell, 

 1934) has attempted, however, to distinguish and allot names 

 to three races, the Chilean, the Bolivian, and the Peruvian, 

 but it can not be said that the characters of these are as yet 

 sufficiently defined or their respective ranges traced. The 

 name Eriomys chinchilla was given by Lichtenstein to a skin of 

 a chinchilla obtained through fur traders and is said to be still 

 in the Berlin Museum. A careful perusal of that author's 

 account reveals nothing of the origin of the specimen beyond 

 the fact that it was one of others traded through Carthagena 

 and La Guayra, Venezuela. t)n the other hand, he implies 

 that Chile is the home of the species, rather than Peru, as 

 sometimes given, for in mentioning Molina's chinchilla or 

 Mus laniger from Chile, he adds, "Die Uebereinstimmung des 

 Namens, sowie der Fundort, machen es sehr wahrscheinlich, 

 das damit unser Thier gemeint sei" (the correspondence of the 

 name as well as of the locality makes it very probable that our 

 animal is the same) . Moreover, the tail length of the specimen 

 figured of half size, would be 6 inches, of the hind foot about 2.5. 

 It was the largest of various skins at a fur dealer's. It thus 

 seems most likely that Lichtenstein's name is a synonym of 

 C. laniger a, published by Bennett very shortly before. This 

 leaves the latter's Chinchilla brevicaudata as the first name 

 applied unequivocally to the Peruvian chinchilla. Prell (1934) 

 believes that the Bolivian chinchilla is also a distinct race and 

 adopts for it the name boliviana given by Brass in a German 

 treatise on fur. The ranges and characters of these races may 

 be further outlined, as follows : 



The Chilean chinchilla is said to occur from about the Rio 

 Chupa in latitude 32 S. northward along the western base of 

 the Andes to the region of Copiapo in northern Chile. It is 



