ANIMALS OF NORTH AMERICA. 
107 
graduates. From the Hudson Bay territory, where we 
ought to look for the most information, from their commerce 
in peltries and contact with rude Nature, very little has been 
gained ; but if the time ever arrives that a railway connecting 
the waters of the Atlantic and Pacific shall he carried through 
British America, not only the whereabouts of certain species, 
now only known as rare in their present haunts, will he 
definitely ascertained, but facilities will he afforded the 
scientific enquirer and the sportsman to meet them on their 
own ground. 
The diversity of climate met with in so large a continent 
naturally adds to the developement of its species ; and, 
according to the different localities traversed, so Nature has, 
with infinite skill, adapted their inhabitants. For instance, 
in traversing the mighty prairies the mind assumes the idea 
of isolation : westward, onwards, without a mountain, with 
scarcely a hill, with rarely a brook or stream to break the 
monotony of the barren, dewless landscape ; loneliness seems 
the traveller’s concomitant. But a nearer gaze reveals the 
life there ; at intervals the fleet antelope looks shyly down 
from some distant crest, then is off on the wings of the wind ; 
the gray wolf more rarely surveys him deliberately, and 
slinks away ; the prairie wolf lingers near, safe in his own 
worthlessness and the traveller’s contempt ; the funny frisky 
little prairie dog barks with amusing alarm at his approach, 
then drops into his hole ; slowly, on easy pinion, the hawk 
circles in the air, and swoops down on the prairie squirrel or 
the mole ; lazily the crow leaps from carcass to carcass, too 
plethoric to caw, too indolent to be frightened. 
Away in the wilds of the Rocky Mountain range, the 
grizzly bear roams amid his fastnesses, his color harmo- 
nizing with the brown, gray and weather beaten crags of his 
mountain home ; while his relatives in the far off icebergs 
and glacier-clad hills of the Arctic zone is as spotless in his 
snowy robes, as the prospect around him. Away in the 
