33 2 Bulletin American Museum of Natural History. [Vol. XlV y 



deux premiers sont du climat tempere de la nouvelle Espagne, de 

 la Louisiane, des Illinois, de la Caroline, &c." 



It must, however, be conceded that Buffon's brief description 

 and plate, and the fuller description by Daubenton, indicate an 

 animal with a head wholly black except a white longitudinal 

 stripe on the front, which shows that the specimen in hand could 

 not, so far as we now know, have come from South America. Both 

 ' le chinche ' and ' le zorille ' were described and figured from 

 poorly stuffed skins in the cabinet of " M. Aubry, Cure de Saint 

 Louis," in Paris (cf. Buffon, /. c., p. 289), without definite indica- 

 tion of the country whence they came, although Buffon evidently 

 supposed they both came from either Peru or some part of the 

 Spanish possessions in America ("nouvelle Espagne"). The 

 most logical conclusion is that both came from Mexico and that 

 * le chinche,' and consequently Schreber's Viverra mephitis, is refer- 

 able to Mephitis macroura Licht. rather than-to any species from 

 the United States or Canada. 



SUMMARY. 



To summarize the foregoing rather intricate discussion, the 

 leading points may be thus stated : 



1. Mephitis Cuvier was restricted to the large two-striped skunks 

 and the little striped skunks of North America by Gray in 1837, 

 through the removal of the bare-nosed skunks of Mexico and 

 South America to form the genus Conepatus. 



2. Mephitis was again restricted by Lichtenstein in 1838 by 

 explicitly limiting the Cuvierian Mephitis to the North American 

 large and small skunks, and proposing Thiosmus for the bare- 

 nosed skunks, Thiosmus thus becoming a synonym of Conepatus, 

 discarded on account of the barbarous origin of the word. 



3. Consequently when Chincha was proposed by Lesson in 1842, 

 ostensibly for the large two-striped skunks of North America, it 

 became a synonym of Mephitis as previously restricted by both 

 Gray and Lichtenstein. 



4. The transference of Mephitis by Lesson in 1842 to a hetero- 

 geneous group, the last species of which chanced to be Spilogale, 

 was hence void. 



5. No identifiable species of Spilogale was included in the 



