118 W. T. Blanford— On tie species of Marmot [No. 3, 



probably a French one, L' Institut, at least so I infer from the fact of a 

 paper by Gervais quoted with a similar reference in the ' Archiv' being 

 assigned to this magazine in Carus and Engelmann's ' Bibliographia Zoolo- 

 gica'. At the same time neither Jameson's nor Gervais' paper is quoted in 

 the Boyal Society's Catalogue, although L' Institut is included in the works 

 catalogued. 



There is a short paper by Dr. Jameson on the Zoology of Chinese 

 Tartary in the Calcutta Journal of Natural History,* in which he briefly 

 mentions a marmot which he observed beyond the Niti pass, and of which 

 he says that it is of a reddish yellow colour and the size of a rabbit. I 

 know of no Himalayan marmot which when adult is so small as a rabbit ; 

 the smallest species is A. Hemaehalanus, and possibly this may have been 

 the animal observed by Jameson, but in Weigmann's ' Archiv' he is said to 

 have described the large Indian marmot : of course it does not follow that 

 the species seen by him north of the Niti Pass was the same which he 

 subsequently named A. Tataricus. Meantime the identification is of less 

 moment, because in all probability the species named by Jameson was 

 either A. Himalayanus, A. Hemaehalanus, or A. caudatus, all of which names 

 have priority over A. Tataricus. 



But the most important point of all is the identification of the short- 

 tailed Himalayan marmot with A. hobac. This apparently was made by 

 Gray without his having examined specimens of A. Himalayanus ; and Blyth, 

 Jerdon, and Anderson, so far as I know, had never seen examples of the 

 true A. bobac, so that I doubt if the species have ever been compared. 

 Pallas (Zoog. Bos. As. I, p. 155) united all the knownf Asiatic marmots 

 without cheek pouches to the JBobac, which he called Arctomys Baibak, but 

 he described the Kamschatkan race as a well marked variety. Brandt 

 (Bull. Ac. St. Pet. 1844, II, p. 364) separated this Kamschatkan form as 

 a distinct species, which he called A. Oamschatica, but which he suggested 

 might be identical with the American A. monax, and he indicated another 

 species from the Altai under the name of A. baihacina, which, however, he 

 did not describe. J Severtzoff quotes this species A. baibacinus from western 

 Turkestan. Without attaching much importance to this circumstance for 

 the reasons already mentioned, I think it yet remains to be shewn that the 

 true A. bobac of Schreber, Mus arctomys of Pallas, is found in Central Asia 

 at all. The name was originally applied to the marmot of Poland and 



* Yol. VII, p. 360. 



f Of course no Himalayan marmots had been described in 1811 -when Pallas's 

 work was first published. 



% He appears to have described it subsequently in a paper on the vertebrata of 

 Siberia, which I cannot find. It is mentioned by Milne-Edwards in Eech. Mam. p. 

 311, note. 



