330 MR. R. BROWN ON THE MAMMALS OF GREENLAND. [May 28, 



3. On the Mammalian Fauna of Greenland. 

 By Robert Brown, F.R.G.S. &c. &c. 



[Communicated by Dr. James Murie.] 



Contents. 



1. History of the Subject, p. 330. 4. Notes on Synonymy and Habits of the 



2. Systematic Distribution, p. 333. terrestrial Species, p. 343. 



3. Geographical Distribution, p. 337. 5. Doubtful and Mythical Species, p. 357. 



I . History of the Subject. 



In entering upon a review of the Greenlandic species of Mammalia, 

 it may be a matter of surprise to some that anything remains to be 

 said concerning the larger animals of a country so comparatively near 

 home, and regarding which so much has been written, where Egede, 

 Fabricius, Vahl, and Rink lived, and regarding which we possess the 

 remarks of such excellent naturalists as the acute authors of the * Fauna 

 Groenlandica ' and 'Gronland Geographisk og Statistisk.' Between 

 the dates of the publication of these two works an interval of upwards 

 of seventy years extends, so that one might suppose that any errors of 

 the first work might have been fully discovered in the interval and 

 corrected in the second. All surprise vanishes, however, when we find 

 that the contrary holds true, and that to-day we know almost as little 

 about the Mammals of Greenland as we did when Fabricius gave us 

 the first systematic account of them. The fact of the matter is that 

 naturalists who have visited Greenland have been too much interested 

 in other departments of natural history to pay attention to the 

 larger members of the fauna, or have supposed that there was 

 nothing worth adding to or (what is just as important) subtracting 

 from it. Accordingly, we find all authors on Arctic animals merely 

 contentiug themselves with giving a list of Fabricius's species, and at 

 the same time perpetuating the errors which he fell into through 

 Ignorance or credulity, independently of the fact that he only wrote 

 of that limited portion of the country then inhabited by the natives 

 over which his authority as a " Grdnlandske Missionair " extended. 

 Can we therefore be astonished if we find the fauna of Greenland, 

 in the class Mammalia, burdened with species which liave no exist- 

 ence save in the vivid Imagination of the Eskimo or the overlearned 

 acnteness of zoologists, and bereft of others which ought to take their 

 place — their history poisoned with fables only worthy of the belief of 

 the last century, and their geographical range in the country over 

 which they are distributed scarcely touched on, or wrongly described. 

 The accounts of the older writers on Greenland (Egede-Saabye, 

 Cranz, &c.) were very unsatisfactory; but a new era In the history 

 of northern zoology dawned when Otto Fabricius, who had passed 

 several years in Greenland as a Missionary, published his ' Fauna 

 Groenlandica'*. This work, far In advance of Its age, and which for 

 the conciseness and accuracy of its descriptions has rarely been sur- 

 passed, has most deservedly retained its place as our standard au- 

 * Hafnia.' et Lipsia', 1780. 



