VARIETIES OF WEASELS 
least- or short-tailed weasel of the East; the ermine; the long- 
tailed northwestern weasel; and the bridled weasel living on 
the Pacific coast and in Mexico. But, in 1896, Outram Bangs 
and C. Hart Merriam examined the collections of skins and 
skulls in the National Museum at Washington and elsewhere, 
and announced that we had twenty-two species and subspecies, 
none precisely the same as those of Europe. Most of them, 
however, belong to the West and far North, and naturalists 
of a less radical school will probably refuse to admit so much 
specific distinction. At any rate, they differ little in general 
character, and such peculiarities as belong to each Merriam 
connects with their food. Thus he finds that the group of 
northern weasels represented by Putorius cicognani flour- 
ishes only in the country where the meadow mice (Microtus) 
abound; the large western weasel, P. /ongicauda, does not range 
much outside of the re- 
gion inhabited by the 
pocket gophers on which 
it feeds; the black-footed 
one frequents only the 
prairie-dog country south- 
ward; and “in the far ay 
North, where the frozen 
tundras are inhabited by 
lemmings as well as voles, two weasels are present: the tiny, 
narrow-skulled ‘rixosus,’ which feeds mainly on mice, and 
the large, broad-skulled ‘arcticus’ [analogue of the true 
ermine] on lemmings and rabbits.” With these fine points 
of classification we need not here concern ourselves. A 
weasel, in the Old World or in the New, in Labrador, or 
Florida, or Mexico, on the Yukon as on the Hudson, is 
substantially the same, —a keen, agile, relentless, indomitable 
hunter, within his powers a being of the highest type of 
effectiveness. 
CALIFORNIA BRIDLED WEASEL. 
169 
