7 



ART. XXXVII.-SYNOMMATIC LIST OF THE AMERICAN SCIURI, 

 OR ARBOREAL SQUIRRELS. 



BY J. A. ALLEN. 



Since the publication last year of my revision of the American Sciuri* 

 the "Neotropical" species of the group have been ably reviewed by Mr. 

 E. E. Alston,t under unusually favorable circumstances. With his ac- 

 customed thoroughness, he has taken the trouble to seek out the types, 

 so far as they are extant or accessible in several of the principal museums 

 of Europe, of most of the species of former authors, and has thus been able 

 to determine the character of many species so inadequately described, 

 that in no other way could their proper allocation be satisfactorily de- 

 termined. His careful elucidation of this obscure and perplexing group 

 has not only placed his fellow-workers in the same field under lasting 

 obligations to him, but must mark an era in the history of the subject. 

 Of the fifty-nine nominal species of this group described by different 

 authors, he informs us that he has examined the types of no less than 

 forty-one ! With the rich material of the British Museum at his com- 

 mand, he has been able to tell us exactly what the late Dr. Gray had for 

 the basis of his nineteen u new species", described in a single paper in 

 1867, some of them so vaguely or inaccurately that the descriptions are 

 sometimes misleading, and often inadequate indices of what he actually 

 had before him. Mr. Alston has also been able to allocate the species 

 described previously by the same author, and by Bichardson, Bennett, 

 Ogilby, and other British writers. In the Paris Museum, he found still 

 extant the types of most of the species described many years since by 

 Is. Geoffroy, Lesson, F. Cuvier, and Pucheran, and in the Berlin Museum 

 types of the species described by Dr. Peters ; so that the only important 

 ones not seen by him are those of Brandt, Wagner, and Natterer. To 

 assist him in collating my own work, I had the pleasure of sending him 

 examples of the greater part of the species recognized by me in my 

 recent monograph of the American Sciuridce. As I had not access to 

 the types of the species described by foreign authors, I made, in some 

 instances, my allocations of synonymy with doubt, and, in other cases, 

 only provisionally, feeling conscious of the uncertainty with which refer- 



* Coues and Allen's " Monographs of North American Rodentia", pp. 666-797, August, 

 1877. 



t " On the Squirrels of the Neotropical Region ", Proc. Zool. Soc. Lond. 1878, pp. 

 656-670, pi. xli. This highly important memoir gives excellent diagnoses of the species, 

 with their synonymy in full, and a critical commentary on the species of previous 



authors. 



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