164 
JOURNAL OF MAMMALOGY 
rat are doubtless ere this proving successful. Results with some of 
our less domestic and less amenable animals are harder to obtain, 
hence any light that the field naturalist can shed upon the subject 
should be welcomed. It is to encourage the reporting of such sporadic 
cases and possibly to contribute to a slowly accumulating fund of evi- 
dence, that this note is offered for publication. 
An abnormally colored specimen of the southern California mole, 
Scapanus latimanus occultus, was recently placed in my hands by a 
student who had captured it in a gopher trap in the city of San Gabriel, 
California. The specimen is, to my way of thinking, far more inter- 
esting than an ordinary case of albinism. It is not an albino but is 
light cinnamon yellow in color. This pigment, with the glistening 
quality of the mole^s fur, results in a beautiful golden effect quite 
pleasing to the eye. It seems to me that this particular blunder on the 
part of nature has an even greater interest beyond its beauty in that 
it may throw some light upon the color composition of the mole. 
The normal color of the species under discussion is, at first impres- 
sion, a uniform slate gray with silvery reflections. This uniformity 
is notable in nestlings, in half grown, and in adult specimens. It ap- 
plies to the individual hair from practically its base to its tip as well 
as to the entire body of the animal. Only on the extreme margins of 
the lips or upon the nearly bare feet and tail do we find a lighting up 
of the dark slate monochrome by whitening of the hairs. The simplest 
conclusion would be that color in the mole is due to a single heritable 
factor even as color in the human negroid was at one time supposed to 
be. Those who have seen the startling results of segregation of deter- 
miners displayed in red-haired mullatos may be ready to concede the 
possibility of complexity in the slate monochrome of moles. 
MICROSCOPIC STUDY OF THE HAIR 
The fully developed hair of the southern California mole is a struc- 
ture of varying diameter with very thick cortex and relatively small 
medulla. A succession of three or four constrictions of both cortex 
and medulla, resulting sometimes in complete loss of the latter, is 
noticeable between base and tip of hair. The hair is narrow at its 
base and is widest in a region near the tip whence it begins to taper off 
to a point. Along the medulla the pigmented areas appear as dark 
masses resembling bubbles of india ink regularly distributed along a 
capillary glass tube, except that they are more like discs than bubbles 
