1881.] Himalayas, Tibet, and Afghanistan. 89 



mentioned at p. lxviii of the " Memoir on the Mammalogy of the Hima- 

 layas," by W. Ogilby, published as an appendix in Royle's ' Illustrations 

 of the Botany &c. of the Himalayas,' and the dried skin was said to be 

 undistinguishable from that of A. arvalis. In the same memoir, on the 

 preceding page (lxvii), another short-tailed rodent is said to have been 

 observed by Hodgson and Herbert, and supposed to be a Lemming. The 

 animals noticed were doubtless Arvicolce, no Lemming having ever been 

 found as yet in the Himalayan area. The original specimen of A. roylei 

 has been preserved in the British Museum, and was originally procured by 

 Royle, it is said from Kashmir. 



The next notice in order of date was by Mr. Hodgson, who, in 1849, 

 recorded the occurrence of an Arvicoline animal in Sikkim. For this form, 

 which he considered the type of. a new genus, he proposed the name Neodon 

 sikimensis . As will be shown presently, the genus cannot be maintained 

 as distinct from Arvicola, although it forms a well-marked section, dis- 

 tinguished by its dentition. In 1863 Mr. Blyth proposed a third genus 

 Phaiomys, for a species, which he named Ph. leucurus, brought by Mr. 

 Theobald from the banks of the Tsomoriri, in Western Tibet. The reasons 

 assigned for the establishment of the genus, namely, that the Tibetan form 

 is more robust and has a well-developed thumb and nail to the fore foot, 

 appear to have been suggested by comparison of an abnormally large in- 

 dividual with but one or two species of Arvicola, since many Voles are 

 equally robust, and numerous species possess a well-marked thumb fur- 

 nished with a nail*. The specific name also, having bsen preoccupied, has 

 been changed to A. blythi. 



The three species thus described were all enumerated in Blyth's 

 ' Catalogue of the Mammalia in the Museum Asiatic Society,' published 

 in 1863, and two of them were described in Jerdon's ' Mammals of India.' 

 The third species, Phaiomys leucurus, was noticed only, not described, as 

 the trans-Himalayan region was not comprised in the countries the animals 

 of which were included by Jerdon in his fauna. No further addition was 

 made to the number of Arvicoline animals from the Himalayas for some 

 years, until, in 1872, A. Milne-Edwards described a new species, A. melan- 

 ogaster, brought by Pere David from the eastern portion of the Himalayan 



* See ' Scientific Results of the Second Yarkand Mission,' Mammalia, pp. 39 — 43. 

 There are three serious misprints on p. 39. The first, 15 lines from the bottom, con- 

 sists of the omission of the words "of the thumb" after "ungual phalanx." The 

 second is in the measurements : " Do. of fore foot and claws " should be " Length of 

 fore foot " &c; as it stands it appears to be the breadth. The third is the worst of 

 all : I wished to point out that if the genus Phaiomys be retained, the correct spelling 

 is Phccomys. The printer has made nonsense of this by putting Phaiomys in both 

 instances. 



