552 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXIX. No. 744 



edly taken or seen within the past three years 

 along the Connecticut River valley in central 

 Massachusetts. He thinks they have been 

 increasing there of late and his evidence, 

 ■when compared with that of earlier writers, 

 seems to show that they are at least as numer- 

 ously represented now as they were fifty or 

 sixty years ago. In his opinion it is "pos- 

 sible to postulate the persistence of these 

 animals in this state as a logical consequence 

 of their shy habits and tendencies to roam 

 about " although their " abundance " " in the 

 Connecticut River valley has suggested" 

 to his mind " that they have come along this 

 waterway from the north outside the limits 

 of the state to the smaller tributaries of the 

 river in the lowland of the valley," whence 

 " they may have traveled eastward through 

 the valleys of the Ware, the Assabet, and the 

 Blackstone to the seaboard." There is, too, 

 he believes, a "possibility of their having 

 come along another waterway from the north 

 — ^the Merrimac, along the tributaries of 

 which — the Concord and the Nashua — they 

 might have easily made their way southward." 

 He says further, the " comparative scarcity " 

 of the otter " in the eastern part of the state is 

 noteworthy." Of its recent occurrence there 

 he is able, apparently, to give but one in- 

 stance — on the authority of Dr. Glover M. 

 Allen, who " found unmistakable tracks of the 

 otter near Dedham, Norfolk County, two win- 

 ters ago." 



That otters may occasionally reach central 

 Massachusetts from northern New England 

 by way of the Connecticut River is not im- 

 probable, for they are restless, wide-roving 

 creatures, accustomed to making long jour- 

 neys through convenient waterways and also 

 to traveling overland from pond to pond and 

 stream to stream, sometimes over high moun- 

 tain ridges. I suspect, however, that at the 

 present time they are more likely to move up 

 than down the Connecticut, for Mr. Gordon's 

 testimony indicates that they are now more 

 plentifully represented along the Massachu- 

 setts reaches of that river than in the wilder 

 regions near its source — of which I know 

 something from personal experience. 



I have been familiar with Concord River 

 and with the lower reaches of the Assabet, for 

 upwards of forty years. If, during this 

 period, otters have frequented, or even casually 

 visited either of these streams, the fact re- 

 mains unknown to me. But they have been 

 found to my knowledge along the Sudbury 

 River, not far above where it unites with the 

 Assabet to form the Concord, and most fre- 

 quently, I believe, in or near what is known 

 as Fairhaven Bay, a shallow expansion of the 

 Sudbury, lying partly in Concord and partly 

 in Lincoln. Here my friends, Mr. Charles M. 

 Carter and Mr. George C. Deane, had a good 

 view of one, in broad daylight, early in the 

 month of June, 1876. It swam across the bay 

 from shore to shore, moving through the 

 water swiftly and carrying its head well above 

 the surface after the manner of its kind. 

 During the next ten or twelve years I heard 

 repeatedly of otters that had been seen or 

 tracked by local hunters and fishermen of my 

 acquaintance, either along the river or its 

 small tributary streams, and invariably 

 within a mile or two of the bay. One man in 

 whom I had fuU confidence reported finding 

 fresh otter " slides " in the deep, boggy hol- 

 low which the Fitchburg Railroad crosses just 

 to the eastward of Walden Pond and which 

 forms the source of a cold trout brook that 

 flows into Fairhaven Bay. Another account, 

 for the truth of which I can not vouch but 

 which, as I remember, was very generally 

 credited at the time, related to an otter said 

 to have been killed in midwinter in the public 

 road near the bridge that spans the river just 

 above the bay, by a farmer who lived at Nine 

 Acre Comer, an outlying settlement of Con- 

 cord. As the story ran, this man was wend- 

 ing his way homeward through deep snow, 

 late one stormy night, when he was startled 

 by the sudden appearance of the otter directly 

 in front of him and only a few yards away. 

 On seeing him it left the road and plunged 

 into a snow drift, which so impeded its 

 further progress that he overtook it without 

 much difficulty and despatched it with a 

 stick. 

 A man living in Lincoln, about a mile and 



