MAMMALIA. 209 
As the animal lives wholly under ground like a mole, these pouches serve the 
purpose of bags for carrying the earth out of their holes. They are filled with the 
fore-claws, and emptied at the mouth of the hole by a power which the animal 
possesses of ejecting the pouches from each cheek in the manner that a cap or 
stocking is turned. In this way it works its path under ground, and ploughs up the 
prairies in many places in such a manner, that the white hunters of the Missouri and 
Arkansas frequently avail themselves of the labours of the gopher by planting 
corn upon the prairies which have been thus mellowed. It lives entirely upon 
the roots of plants, eating all with indiscriminate voracity, and has been found 
particularly destructive to beets, carrots, and other tap rooted plants in the military 
gardens at St. Peter’s*,” 
Mr. Schoolcraft’s account of the manners of the Mississippi gauffre, and the 
mode in which it uses its cheek-pouches, is evidently the testimony of an eye- 
witness, and may be compared with Mr. Douglas’s equally clear and precise 
description of the habits of the Columbia sand-rat, A minute examination of the 
specimens in my possession induces me to place implicit reliance on both these 
accounts. The skin of the geomys Douglasiz, even when thoroughly soaked, cannot 
be made to fold in, so as to produce the hood-like cheek-pouch of a gauffre, neither 
can the pouch of the diplostoma bulbworum be everted, so as to become pen- 
dulous. Its bottom alone can be turned out, by which it is emptied of its contents 
in the manner mentioned by Mr. Schoolcraft ; but the lining of the exterior parietes 
of the pouch is firmly united to the external skin, and is incapable of being everted. 
The incisors in form and position, the form of the mouth, the ears, eyes, extremities, 
and tail of the sand-rats, bear, however, a very close resemblance to those of the 
gauffres, and they cannot be finally established as separate genera, until their 
dentition has been compared. The Camas-rats are very common on the plains of 
the Multnomah River, and may, as Mr. Douglas informs me, be easily snared in 
the summer. ‘ 
* ScHOOLCRAFT, Journ., p. 365. 
2E 
