66 PROCEEDINGS : BOSTON SOCIETY NATURAL HISTORY. 
blue stripes; narrowly striped with fuscous. Gastrosteges 150, uro- 
steges 114.” He received his specimens from Kalm and gives the 
type locality as “Canada.” Kalm did his collecting in northern 
Vermont, along Lake Champlain, arid from Montreal to Quebec. 
He apparently makes no mention of this snake, in his journals 
covering this region, so that it is impossible to say whether or no 
he got his specimens from northern Vermont, bordering southern 
Canada, or from Quebec, if indeed he got them from that region at 
all, though Kalm was a careful collector and would probably have 
labeled his specimens correctly. The description of Linnaeus was 
doubtless taken from alcoholic specimens in which the three yellow 
stripes had been turned by the alcohol to a “greenish blue.” The 
fact of there being three greenish blue stripes would seem to point 
to the probability that he was dealing with the more southern form, 
with the three bright yellow stripes, since specimens of T. s. palli- 
dula , even in life, have the dorsal stripe almost obscured, and 
specimens preserved in alcohol or formalin soon lose the color of 
the stripes to such an extent that in many cases the stripes would 
be overlooked altogether, unless known to have been there origi¬ 
nally. Furthermore, most of the country through which Kalm 
passed, was of the Transition and not the Canadian zone, of which 
pallichda is the characteristic form. The evidence, thus, as to 
which of the two types, the northern or the southern, Linnaeus pos¬ 
sessed, is about equal on both sides, though perhaps slightly in 
favor of his specimens having been of the southern form. I shall, 
therefore, restrict the name Thamnophis sirtalis (Linn.) to the 
brighter-colored form found in the Transition and Austral zones of 
the East, a description of which from several live specimens from 
Cambridge, Mass., is as follows: — Size, proportions, and’scales as 
in T. s. pallidida. Color: (young and adults) above, black, with 
three greenish yellow, longitudinal stripes ; one median dorsal, two 
lateral. The dorsal stripe occupies o'ne and two half scale rows, 
the lateral stripes occupy the second and third rows. Two longi¬ 
tudinal series of squarish spots on each side between the dorsal and 
lateral stripes, the spots of the superior row alternating with those 
of the inferior. These spots are very often entirely black and can 
then best be seen by pulling apart the scales, when the spots are 
outlined by the black spaces between the scales composing the spot. 
Occasionally one or two of the scales will have a faint reddish por¬ 
tion in the middle, thus approaching the condition in pallidula. 
