assistant, Mr. Orestes H. St. John, I am greatly indebted for assist- 

 ance, I was enabled to pass a considerable part of this time with 

 one of his exploring parties, and to traverse large portions of nine 

 counties. 1 These are situated a little to the southwest of the centre 

 of the State, and embrace an area nearly sixty miles square; and to 

 this region most of my special remarks refer. Large portions of this 

 tract were then in a nearly primitive condition, many of its broad 

 prairies being still undisturbed by the plow. Yet the hunter and the 

 " first settler " had passed over it and destroyed or driven away many 

 of the larger mammals. But the recent presence of these animals here 

 was still fresh in the minds of the older settlers, many of whom had 

 witnessed and assisted in their rapid extirpation. 



Iowa being situated in a prairie region, it necessarily differs con- 

 siderably in the general character of its fauna, and especially in re- 

 spect to its mammalia, from that of the wooded portion of the United 

 States to the eastward, as all who have given attention to the geo- 

 graphical distribution of animals must be aware. Yet we do not in 

 this State fairly enter upon the so-called Middle Province of the con- 

 tinent, which differs so markedly, both in faunal and floral, from the 

 Eastern Province. A great change in the fauna and flora is met with, 

 however, at the point of junction of the wooded and woodless regions 

 of the eastern half of the continent, which in the latitude of Iowa 

 occurs more than a hundred miles to the eastward of that State. At 

 this point as great and as abrupt a change occurs as usually takes 

 place between two contiguous faunal districts, one of which lies to 

 the north or to the south of the other, or where the line of division is 

 an isothermal one, separating different climatic and zoological zones. 

 A few only, if any, of the species embraced in this list seem to find 

 their eastern limit of distribution in this State; but, with two or three 

 exceptions, they range through southern Wisconsin, Illinois, and even 

 into northwestern Indiana and southern Michigan, or to the eastern 

 limit of the prairies. Also, with very few exceptions, none are re- 

 stricted to it in either their northward or southward range. A few of 

 the more northern species, whose southern range is restricted to the 

 southern border of the Alleghanian fauna, may reach the northern 

 counties of Iowa, as a few essentially southern species may approach, 

 or even be ibund occasionally within its southern borders. Iowa is 

 hence mainly embraced within the Carolinian fauna, at least so far 

 as its mammals, birds and reptiles are concerned, though generally 



1 Dallas, Guthrie, Boone, Greene, Carroll, Crawford, Sac, Calhoun and Audubon. 



