Journal of Mammalogy 
Published Quarterly by the American Society of Mammalogists 
VoL. 1 NOVEMBER, 1920 No. 5 
NOTES ON HEUDE’S BEARS IN THE SIKAWEI MUSEUM, 
AND ON THE BEARS OF PAUmRCTIC EASTERN 
ASIA 
By Arthur de Carle Sowerby, F.R.G.S., F.Z.S. 
Since the publication in 1897 to 1901 of Pere Heude^s ‘^Memoires 
concernant FHistoire Naturelle de FEmpire Chinois’^ there has been 
considerable confusion in regard to the status of many of the species 
of mammals that he named or described. His views on the classifi- 
cation of animals were such as to lead the worthy naturalist to name 
and describe a great many species upon such slender grounds, that he 
produced a state of confusion bordering on chaos in the orders and 
famihes he touched. Often he published bare names without any 
descriptions, or at best with fragmentary illustrations. 
Thus it comes about that mammalogists have experienced consider- 
able difficulty in satisfactorily determining the status of the Chinese 
species of the genera Sus, Nemorhcedus, Urotragus, and Ursus, as well 
as of the members of the family Cervidce. Through the courtesy of the 
Jesuit Fathers in charge of the famous Sikawei Museum, Si-ka-wei, 
Shanghai, I was able in 1915 to examine much of the material upon 
which Heude based his names and descriptions, and so to determine 
with, I think, some degree of accuracy the status of the species con- 
cerned belonging to the genera and family mentioned. The results, 
in part, were published in a paper ‘‘On Heude’s Collection of Pigs, 
Sika, Serows, and Corals in the Sikawei Museum, Shanghai,’^ in the 
Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London, April, 1917, pp. 7-26. 
The present paper deals with the various species of bears found in 
China and neighboring eastern Asia, and is based on the examination 
of various skulls in the Sikawei Museum, in the Smithsonian Institu- 
tion, and in my own collection. 
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