THE EEINDBER. 455 



from the forests to the mountains overhanging the Norwegian 

 and Lapland coasts." 



The reindeer will only gallop when actually forced to do so, 

 although in pictures the animal is generally represented as flying 

 over the snow in this manner. Its ordinary pace is an awkward, 

 straddley walk, varied occasionally by a still more ungraceful, 

 slouching trot. Its speed in a loaded sledge is about ten Enghsh 

 miles an hour, and its powers of endurance are very great : so 

 much so, that journeys of one hundred and fifty miles in nineteen 

 hours are not uncommon. De Brooke states that there is a 

 portrait of a reindeer in the royal palace of Drotningholm, 

 (Sweden), which is said to have performed the extraordinary feat 

 on an occasion of emergency in 1699, of drawing an officer who 

 carried important despatches, a distance of eight hundred English 

 miles in forty-eight consecutive hours. The report is current that 

 the poor beast dropped down dead at the conclusion of the 

 journey. 



The caribou of North America appears, as before stated, to be 

 identical with the European reindeer. These animals are to be 

 found across the whole width of the American continent, but 

 except perhaps in certain districts of Nova Scotia, are most 

 abundant on the western side of the Rocky Mountains and the 

 northern parts of British Columbia. 



' It is almost impossible, however, to accurately define the terri- 

 tories in which the animals are most plentiful, for the work of 

 exterminating the larger fauna of America is one that makes 

 rapid strides. The observation made with respect to the habitat of 

 the reindeer being confined to the northern regions is also ap- 

 plicable to the caribou in America. It now abounds south of the 

 Hudson's Bay to the United States, and from Newfoundland to 

 the Pacific, but their fossil remains have been found as far south 

 as Ohio. Mr. S. J. Hays, in a paper read before the New York 

 Lyceum of Natural History in 1871, remarked that at the period 

 fraught with so much meaning to the Indians, namely, " the 

 arrival of the white man," the range of the caribou was no more 

 extensive than at present. The settlers of New Amsterdam knew 

 of it only from the Indians, and, from the inaccurate description 



