XXXIV INTRODUCTION. 
Fur Company of that nation; but of which no account has-been given 
to the world, except of the coast, respecting which some information 
may be obtained from the narratives of Captain Cook, Kotzebue, and 
other voyagers. The few Indians of Mackenzie River, who have 
crossed the Rocky Mountains, report that, on their western side, there 
is a tract of barren grounds frequented by caribou and musk oxen; and 
the furs procured by the Russian Company indicate that woody regions, 
similar to those to the eastward of the mountains, also exist there. 
Langsdorff gives the following list of skins contained in the principal 
magazine of the Russian Fur Company, on the island of Kodiak, most 
of them collected on the peninsula of Alaska, Cook’s River, and other 
parts of thecontinent. | 
Brown and red bears, black bears, foxes black and silver-gray, (the 
stone fox, canis lagopus, is not found to the southward of Oonalaska), 
glutton, sea, river, and marsh otters, lynx, beaver, zizel marmot, com- 
mon marmot, hairy hedge-hog (erinaceus ecaudatus), rein-deer, American 
wool-bearing animal. 
The quadrupeds which inhabit the shores of the Polar Sea, are the 
same that are comprised in the list of the animals of the Barren 
Grounds. On the remote North Georgian Islands, in latitude 75°, there 
are nine different species of mammiferous animals, of which five are 
carnivorous, and four herbivorous. The following is Captain Sabine’s 
list of them :— 
Ursus maritimus. 
Gulo luscus. 
Mustela erminea. 
Canis lupus. 
Canis lagopus. 
Lemmus Hudsonius, 
Lepus glacialis, 
Bos moschatus They arrive on Melville Island towards the 
middle of May, and quit it on their return 
These two animals are only summer visitors. 
to the South in the end of September. 
Cervus Tarandus 
IT have not enumerated the seals, moose, or whales, in any of the 
lists; nor have I attempted to give a description of any of them in the 
text, because my opportunities of examining them were too limited te 
