166 Recent Literature. [ March, 
plete monographs ever published in this country, and a notable contri- 
bution to American science. The author recognizes two species of fossil 
bisons in America, B. latifrons and B. antiquus and a single living 
. species, B. Americanus, of which he considers B. antiquus the immedi- 
ate progenitor. The systematic part of the work, including a full ac- 
count of the variation and habits of the recent species, extends over 
seventy pages, and the plates are illustrative of this portion. The map 
accompanies the larger part of the work, which relates to the past and 
present geographical distribution of the American bison and presents an 
appalling picture of the reckless waste and rapidly diminishing numbers 
of this noble animal. By most painstaking research among historical 
works and systematic inquiry among living witnesses, he has established 
the boundaries of the.range of the “buffalo” as it existed when the 
white man first landed in America and at successive epochs to the pres- 
ent time, when it has become separated into a northern and a southern 
herd occupying comparatively restricted areas. The details extend over 
one hundred pages, but in the first part of his work Mr. Allen gives a 
general summary, as follows : — 
“ The habitat of the bison formerly extended from Great Slave Lake 
on the north, in latitude about 62°, to the northwestern provinces of 
Mexico, as far south as latitude 25°. Its range in British North Amer- 
ica extended from the Rocky Mountains on the west to the wooded 
highlands about six hundred miles west of Hudson’s Bay, or about to 
a line running southeastward from the Great Slave Lake to the Lake of 
the Woods. Its range in the United States formerly embraced a consid- 
erable area west of the Rocky Mountains, its recent remains having 
been found in Oregon as far west as the Blue Mountains, and farther 
south it occupied the Great Salt Lake Basin, extending westward even 
to the Sierra Nevada Mountains, while less than fifty years since it ex- 
isted over the head waters of the Green and Grand rivers, and other 
sources of the Colorado, East of the Rocky Mountains its range ex- 
tended southward far beyond the Rio Grande, and eastward throughout 
the region drained by the Ohio River and its tributaries. Its northern 
limit east of the Mississippi was the Great Lakes, along which it ex- 
tended eastward to near the eastern end of Lake Erie: It appears not 
to have occurred south of the Tennessee River, and only to a limited 
extent east of the Alleghanies, chiefly in the upper districts of North, 
and South Carolina.” 
“ Its present range embraces two distinct and comparatively small 
areas. The southern is chiefly limited to Western Kansas, a part of the 
Indian Territory, and Northwestern Texas, — in all together embracmg 
a region about equal in size to the present State of Kansas. The voe 
ern district extends from the sources of the principal southern tributa- 
ries of the Yellowstone northward into the British Possessions, embrac- 
ing an area not much greater than the present Territory of Montana 
