116 
Alabama and Florida is the common occur- 
rence of small mounds of sand a foot or more 
in diameter and a few inches high, scattered 
irregularly over the surface or in more or less 
evident lines, and usually several feet apart. 
A traveler from farther northeast, seeing these 
mounds for the first time, might easily imag- 
ine that some one had been driving along with 
a wagon-load of sand and dumping it out in 
large shovelfuls. They are seen best in winter 
and spring, partly because the surrounding 
vegetation is less conspicuous then, and partly 
for other reasons. 
These diminutive mounds cover the outlets 
of the burrows of a subterranean rodent, 
Geomys Tuza, which is known throughout its 
range as the “salamander.”* (Zoologists have 
divided the original G. T’uza into some half- 
dozen species and subspecies, but there are no 
wider gaps between the ranges of the different 
forms than there are between some colonies of 
the same species, and they all have essentially 
the same habits and habitat, so that for the 
purposes of this discussion it will be most con- 
venient to treat the group as a unit.) The 
animal feeds on roots, travels entirely under- 
ground, as far as known, and very rarely shows 
itself, in the daytime at least. 
While working for the Florida State Geo- 
logical Survey in 1908-1910 I had occasion to 
visit every county and to travel on nearly 
every railroad in that state; and on railroad 
journeys I usually had nothing better to do 
than look out of the car-window and make 
notes on the topography, vegetation and other 
geographical features. The salamander hills, 
which certainly constitute one of the topo- 
graphic features, even if a very insignificant 
1Dr. C. Hart Merriam in his elaborate mono- 
graph of Geomys and related genera (‘‘N. Am. 
Fauna No. 8,’’ p. 112, 1895) characterized this 
common name as ‘‘singularly inappropriate and 
misleading.’’ But contrary opinions as-to its ap- 
propriateness have been expressed by Goode 
(Powell’s Report on Colorado River, p. 281, 1875) 
and Bangs (Proc. Bost. Soc. Nat. Hist., 28, p. 175, 
1898); and it is no more misleading than the 
names cypress, cedar, sycamore and poplar, applied 
to very different trees in this country from what 
they are in the old world. 
SCIENCE 
[N.S. Vou. XXXV. No. 890 
one, thus received their share of attention, 
and in that way I have accumulated records of 
hundreds of precise localities for this elusive 
animal. On plotting these on a map recently 
some interesting correlations between them 
and certain other geographical features be- 
eame evident. Jn previous years I had visited 
every county in Georgia and Alabama in 
which Geomys is known, but my notes on its 
distribution in these two states are much less 
complete than they are for Florida. 
In both Georgia and Alabama the sala- 
mander ranges all the way across the coastal 
plain up to the fall-line, in about latitude 
33° 15’, but one can travel many miles without 
seeing any evidences of it, and it is much less 
abundant in those states and in west Florida 
than it is in peninsular Florida. The Biolog- 
ical Survey of the U. S. Department of Agri- 
culture has a record” of just one station for 
it outside of the coastal plain, namely, near 
Chipley, Georgia© In Alabama the only 
known stations for it north of the latitude of 
Montgomery seem to be around Kingston, in 
Autauga County; in the northeastern corner 
of Hale County; on high pine hills near Lock 
14 on the Warrior River, and between Brook- 
wood and Searles. At both of the last-named 
stations, which are in the upper (northeastern) 
part of Tuscaloosa County, the salamander 
hills are found over Carboniferous rocks, but 
always where there is a thin layer of some 
unconsolidated coastal plain deposit, pre- 
sumably the Lafayette, on the surface. 
In Florida salamander hills can be seen in 
abundance at frequent intervals all the way 
down to a point between Nocatee and Fort 
Ogden in DeSoto County, about latitude 
27°10’, which is about fifty miles farther 
south than the southernmost station for 
Geomys mentioned by Outram Bangs in his 
interesting paper on the land mammals of 
? Unpublished, but communicated to me by Mr. 
A. H. Howell. 
3 There happens to be also a Chipley in Florida, 
a more important place than the one in Georgia, 
and it is barely possible that the specimen in 
question came from Florida and was ascribed to 
Georgia by a slip of the pen. 
