No. 1.— Notes on the Synonymy of the North American Mink 
with Description of a New Subspecies. 
By Outram Baxgs. 
In northeastern North America there are two well-defined geo¬ 
graphical races of the mink, one occupying the Carolinian zone and 
finding its way north along the Atlantic seaboard to the coast of 
Maine, the other belonging to the Boreal zone and extending south, 
in the interior, to the mountains of New York and Pennsylvania, 
and probably to the higher Alleghanies of Virginia and North 
Carolina. 
Although the earlier authors proposed many names for our mink, 
most of them are synonyms, and no one seems to have had any idea 
of really dividing the species in a systematic manner, until in 1854 
Audubon and Bachman, in the third volume of their Quadrupeds of 
North America, gave the small dark-colored northern mink a new 
and appropriate name — Putorius nigrescens. Their description is 
clear, and the separation was a good and justifiable one, but unfortu¬ 
nately they overlooked the fact that the Canadian form was P. vison 
and that Harlan had already named the southern animal Mustela 
lutreocephala. Audubon and Bachman, however, must be credited 
with being the first authors to see the two forms as they really exist. 
Brisson in 1756 named Mustela vison and gave Canada as the 
habitat. As is well known, the material on which all Brisson’s 
work on North American animals was based came from that part of 
the continent, and the name P. vison must hold for the little northern 
mink. It is to be regretted, however, that the authority for the 
name must date from Schreber and not from Brisson, the latter’s 
description having been published two years before the date agreed 
upon for the acceptance of binomial names. Schreber probably 
never saw a specimen of the American mink and takes his descrip¬ 
tion in Die Saugethiere wholly from Brisson, and his figure from 
Buff on. 
A new name for the American mink, Mustela minx , is given in 
Turton’s Linnaeus, 1806, but, as no characters are mentioned that 
could possibly separate it from the northern form, P. vison , and as 
the habitat is stated no more definitelv than North America, it 
