114 ZOOLOGY. 
the animal during certain months, a sufficient time being allowed 
for their increase. At present, this finest of our wild animals 
ranges over territory which will long remain unsettled, owing to 
its want of water. While the river bottoms of Kansas, Nebraska, 
Colorado, ete., will soon be taken up, the high plains of those 
regions will be utterly void, unless occupied by nature’s tenants, 
the buffalo, prong-horn, elk, etc. Artesian wells for irrigating 
these tracts are still in the far future. 
The government of China has preserved several species of ani- 
mals from extinction in the imperial parks and preserves. The 
Czar of Russia has protected the European bison from destruction 
in the old forests of Lithuania. Our own government preserves 
the beauties of the inanimate creation in the Yellowstone park. 
How much more should it keep for the instruction of future gen- 
erations a full representation of those higher works of creative 
mind, the living beings that characterize our continent.— E. D. C 
A PARTIAL COMPARISON OF THE CONCHOLOGICAL FAUN& OF POR- 
TIONS OF THE ATLANTIC AND Pacreic Coasts or NORTH AMERICA. 
—A distinguishing feature in the conchological fauna of that 
portion of the Pacific coast included between the Straits of Fuca 
and San Diego, and which is called the Californian and Oregonian 
Zoological Province, when compared with the Atlantic coast of 
North America, from the Arctic seas to Georgia, is the prepon- 
derance in the former province over the latter of those forms of 
molluscan life included in the order Scutibranchiata. 
The total number of marine molluscan species and well-marked 
varieties, so far as known and determined, in the Californian and 
Oregonian Province, is in round numbers 630, of which about 200 
are bivalves, and of the remaining 430, 123 are included within 
certain Scutibranchiate families. Of this 123, no less than 40 
belong to the Chitonidee and as many more to the Trochide. 
Of the 247 marine gasteropods enumerated by the late Dr. Stimp- 
son in the Smithsonian Institution check-list, from the Arctic 
seas to Georgia, 32 only, or less than one-eighth, come within the 
order referred to; of this number, 14 belong to the Trochide, 7 
to the Chitonide, and not a single specimen of Haliotis has been 
- found as yet within the limits named, and only a single individual 
of very small size has as yet been reported from any point on the 
- Atlantic coasts of the two Americas, and the solitary specimen 
