GENERAL NOTES 
91 
memoir Felis ruffa is also unmistakably used as a vernacular name in the same 
way as lynx, caracal, and chaus. In the summary of this paper (op. cit., p. 62) 
these cats are enumerated as ‘‘Lyncis Auctorum, Felis ruffse Pennanti, Cara- 
calis Buffonii et Chai nostri.” Gueldenstaedt’s Lynx is the Felis Ujnx Linn4; 
his Felis ruffa is the Bay Cat of Pennant, the “Felis rufa Gueldenstaedt” as 
rendered by Schreber; his Caracal is primarily the Caracal of Buff on; his Chaus 
is the “Felis chaus Gueldenstaedt,” as rendered by Schreber. Schreber, in 
Theil III of his Saugthiere, in the part issued in 1777, is the first author to mis- 
quote Gueldenstaedt’s vernacular names, thus giving them the form and status 
of properly constructed binomial technical names, and they have been accepted 
as such by subsequent authors who have apparently, almost without exception,, 
taken them from Schreber without verification. It thus happens that the North 
American bay lynx still carries in our latest publications the technical designation 
Lynx Tuffus (Gueldenstaedt), although the correct authority for the name is; 
Schreber, who first gave it form, changing the specific name ruffa to rufa. The 
name of the bay lynx should therefore be Lynx rufa Schreber. 
As of bibliographic interest, it may be mentioned that Gueldenstaedt’ s paper 
is not cited by Erxleben in his “ Systema Regni Animalis,” published early im 
1777 . — J. A. Allen. 
THE WOOD RAT AS A COLLECTOR 
It is of course well known that wood rats of the genus Neotoma carry away 
and put in their nest piles almost any trinket or small article which they find. 
Doctor Mearns records the fact that the white-throated wood rats of southern 
Arizona {Neotoma albigula) gather together sticks, stones, cow-dung, bones, 
bits of glass, plants, seed-pods, and similar materials, and on one occasion, when 
he was spending the night of April 19-20, 1888, in a cabin in Bloody Basin, 
Arizona, they carried off some boxes of pills. Hen’s eggs, powder boxes, candles, 
cakes of soap, potatoes, Indian corn, seeds of various wild plants, juniper berries, 
and joints of cactus were some of the materials found in their stores. (Mammals 
of the Mexican Boundary, Bull. 56, U. S. Nat. Mus., 1907, pp. 477-480.) 
Through the courtesy of Miss Crissie Cameron of Tacoma, Washington, a 
member of the Committee on Biological Survey Cooperation of the Mountaineers 
Club, we have been favored with the following notes on the collecting activities 
of an individual western bushy-tailed wood rat {Neotoma cinerea occidentalis) . 
This animal had its nest in a box on some rafters in the girls’ dormitory of the 
Mountaineers’ lodge near Snoqualmie Pass, in the Cascade Mountains in Wash- 
ington. A bushel of artiifies had been gathered by. the industrious rats. ‘‘The 
nest was made of oakum pulled from the chinks in the cabiH and lined with what 
appeared to be wool or cotton pulled from a comforter. The nest measured 
6 inches in diameter on the inside and 8 inches on the outside.” 
The nest and box contained the following articles: 
rags, chewed up apple core 
leaves and grass, considerable quantity onion peel 
paper, chewed up 
thumb of glove 
string, pieces 
thongs 
bacon rind 
raisins 
chocolate, 10 bars 
figs 
