356 Fur-hearing Foxes. 



confined. Look well at the beast's eyes, tlie pupils, you 

 observe, are circular; now change the "venu," to employ a 

 legal phrase, and walk into the rodents' house, or visit the 

 den of Arctic foxes, it will do quite as well, and mark the 

 form of the pupillary opening in the eye of the fox; it is 

 elliptical instead of being circular. Here then is one great 

 mark of distinction by which you may easily know a wolf from, 

 a fox. The other generic characters may be thus summed up : 

 The wolves have tails somewhat short and inclined to be 

 bristly, and the middle upper incisor teeth are curiously lobed 

 on either side. The foxes' tails are large and bushy, the hairs 

 covering them long and silky ; the mane-tailed group form 

 no exception, as the stiff hairs do not in any way detract from 

 the bushy appearance of the tail. The general form of the fox 

 is much more lissome and slender than that of the wolf. In 

 all true wolves the post-orbital process of the frontal bone is 

 markedly convex on its upper surface, rounding off outwards 

 and downwards, and having a well- developed point below the 

 plane of the inter-orbital space ; in the fox this bony process 

 scarcely projects at all, and in a few exceptional cases it is 

 even slightly concave ; the bony point hardly dips at all, a 

 deep indentation marking the process at the place where it 

 springs from the frontal bone. 



It is as well to remark that all the animals of a fox-like 

 type found in South America, occupy a sort of intermediate 

 position betwixt the wolves and foxes proper; indeed they 

 are more nearly allied to the former than to the latter group, 

 as the pupillary opening is circular, and the general form 

 very wolf-like. Burmeister proposes a division of the South 

 American fox-like wolves into two groups, lycalopex and 

 jpseudalojpex. 



The silver fox, or as it is often styled, the black fox 

 (Vulpes argentatus), stands first in our list of fur-bearing foxes 

 as supplying the most valuable fur. An idea may be formed 

 of the money value of the finer skins procured from the silver 

 foxes, when we learn that a single skin has been sold in 

 London for the sum of £100. At the Hudson's Bay Company's 

 London sale, held in March, 1866, silver fox skins, in number 

 040, realized for the best skins £30 per skin, for inferior 

 qualities, 32s. per skin, which gives an average of £7 9s. 3d. 

 per skin • 646 skins at £7 9s. 3d. per skin = £4820 18s. 6d. I 

 have not been able to find out the prices that silver fox skins 

 realized at the other fur company's sales, which were held about 

 the same time, but I shall be pretty near the truth if I assume 

 that the amounts were equal to those of tlu> 1 1 udson's Bay Com- 

 pany's. The Messrs. Lampson generally oiler for sale quite 

 us many silver fox skins as the Hudson's Bay Company, and 



