Xo. .314] 



NOTES AND LIT 



0.",5 



most welcome and will mark an era in the history of the genus, 

 and for a long time to come will be the standard reference work 

 for the group and the point of departure in future invest Odious. 



The first member of tin 1 genus to receive a name was the com- 

 mon w hite-footed mouse of the northeastern Knifed States, called 

 by Kerr in 1792 Mus (u/mrius amrricimts. renamed Mus sylvati- 

 CU8 noveboraccnsis by Fischer in 1829, both authors regarding it 

 as a variety only of a European species. By 1850 the number of 

 named forms bad increased to 9, to which were added 8 during 

 the next decade, of which 13 were formally recognized by Baird 

 in l.^oT. During the next twenty-five years only two or three 

 new names were added to the list, but from 1885 on to date the 

 number rapidly increased; "no fewer than 167 names for new 

 or supposed new forms of Peromyscus," says Osgood, "have 

 been proposed since 1885," to which 14 were added by him in the 

 present paper, making a total of approximately 200 names to be 

 dealt with in the considerat ion of the group. In the present re- 

 vision 143 of these names are accepted as representing valid 

 forms, of which 53 are given the rank of species and 90 are 

 treated as subspecies. Of the 53 species, 23 are monotypic and 

 20 are polytypic, or include one or more subspecies, P. manicu- 

 latus including 35 forms, P. leucopus 12, and so on down to 

 monotypic species. According to the author's own statement 

 (p. 24) : "The number of bona fide species scarcely exceeds forty, 

 and of these some half dozen eventually may be reduced in 



In early days the white-footed mice, in common with all other 

 mice, were referred to the Linnaean genus Mus. Later (1853- 

 1874) they were referred to Waterhouse's untenable genus 

 Hesperomys, a name replaced by Coues in 1874 by Vesperimus 

 in a subgeneric sense for certain North American species form- 

 erly referred to Hesperomys, and later (1891) given full generic 

 rank for the group of forms now placed under Peromyscus. It 

 was soon discovered, however, that Vesperimus was antedated 

 by Sitomys Fitzinger (1867), which name had hardly become 

 current before it was found, in 1894, to be antedated by Pero- 

 myscus Gloger (1841), which bids fair to remain the accepted 

 name for the genus. (This case is thus fully cited as an illus- 

 tration of the vicissitudes of generic nomenclature in the attempt 

 to secure permanency of names through the necessary applica- 

 tion of the rule of priority.) 



