THE GRIZZLY AND BLACK BEAR 
weighed as much as 1,000 lb., whilst monsters of 1,500 lb. are doubtful; 
600 lb. may be considered the average weight of a fine male, and 500 lb. 
for females. Colonel Pickett, a noted Wyoming grizzly hunter, in a letter 
to G. O. Shields, says that of forty grizzlies he actually weighed the heaviest 
scaled less than 800 lb. There was a very large grizzly in the Washington 
Zoological Gardens which weighed in September, 1894, 730 lb., and in 
later years he was considered to be much heavier. 
The heaviest weight for one of these bears that is considered authentic 
is 1,153 lb. This is verified by G. O. Shields and is given as the weight of 
a male that lived for eighteen years in Union Park, Chicago, where the 
animal was fed by visitors until he became so fat that he could only crawl 
about. His weight was finally estimated at 2,000 lb. but this was probably 
an exaggeration. 
At present it does not seem possible to separate all the different local 
races of the grizzly bear, and many good naturalists are not disposed to 
accept all the various local sub-species, which only differ in trifling cranial 
measurements. Dr Merriam, who has so long and carefully studied the 
species, will doubtless give us his conclusions at an early date ; but at present 
the confusion seems complete, and no one who has seen a large series of 
bear skins and examined the claws can possibly accept the white and dark 
clawed races, for white and dark clawed bears occur in nearly all known 
areas. 
To name the bears of Kadiak, Yakutat, Pavlof, Sitka (i.e. Baranof), 
Admiralty Island, Montague Island, etc., is too great a strain on our 
credulity and too much like splitting hairs. Doubtless all these bears, if 
a large series were obtained, do differ in very trifling particulars, but they 
are all without doubt direct descendants of an ancestral grizzly which by 
isolation has become very slightly specialized. Under any circumstance, 
to describe them as species is ridiculous. Even if they are accepted, which 
at present appears doubtful, they are only sub-species. Mr Foster, of 
Victoria, showed me in 1908 a large series of the skulls of grizzlies from 
Alaska, the Alaskan Islands, British Columbia and the main range of the 
Rockies, and having mixed these said that it was not possible to assign 
them to their proper localities without reference to the labels. The variation 
in individual skulls were as constant as in those from the Alaskan Penin- 
sula, though, of course, the size of Alaskan bears was on an average very 
much greater than those from the eastern side of the Rocky Mountains. 
I confess that I am quite unable to understand why Dr Merriam makes 
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