MANUAL, &c 



PART I.— BIOLOGY AND GEOLOGY. 



West Greenland; including Davis Strait, Baffin's 

 Bay, Smith Sound, and Kennedy Channel. 



I. — On the Mammalian Fauna of Greenland. By Dr. 

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



[Reprinted by Permission from the Proceedings of the Zoological 

 Society of London, 28 May 1868. With Corrections and 

 Annotations by the Author, March 1875.] 



Contents. 



1. History of the Subject, p. 1. 



2. Systematic Distribution, p. 4. 



3. Geograpliical Distribution, p. 7. 



4. Synonymy and Habits of the 



Terrestrial Species, p. 14, 



5. Doubtful and Mythical Species, p. 28. 



1. History of the Subject. 



In entering upon a review of the Greeniandic 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 natu- 

 ralists as the acute authors of the " Fauna Grcenlandica " and 

 " Gronland geograph. og statist, beskr." 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 

 is that naturalists who have visited Greenland have been too much 

 interested in other departments of natural history to pay atten- 

 tion to the larger members of the fauna, or have supposed that 

 there was nothing worth adding to, or (what is just as impor- 

 tant) subtracting from it. Accordingly, we find all authors on 

 arctic animals merely contenting themselves with giving a list of 

 Fabricius's species, and at the same time perpetuating the errors 

 which he fell into through ignorance or creduhty, 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 

 *' Gronlandske Missionair " extended. Can wo therefore be 

 36122. A 



