124 
ZOOLOGY. 
Note.— Lewis and. Clark speak so positively of the occurrence of a “barking squirrel” in 
the plains of the Columbia, that we cannot entirely pass their statement by without notice. 
According to Mr. Ord, in Guthrie’s Geography—“These animals form in large companies like 
those on the Missouri, occupying with their burrows sometimes two hundred acres of land; the 
burrows are separate, and each possesses, perhaps, ten or twelve of these inhabitants.” 
Perhaps the species mentioned by them may have been, as Professor Baird suggests, the G. 
gunnisonii , or it may have been the C. ludovicianus. If the latter, why did it not “bark,” like 
those on the Upper Missouri. 
I have made several inquiries of individuals well acquainted with the interior of Oregon, but 
have never met with any who have seen the animal, and I have not heard mention of the ‘ ‘ dog 
towns” spoken of by Lewis and Clark. Neither have I seen any indication of the existence of 
the species during my own journey over nearly the same route as that pursued by those 
travellers. 
May not these animals have formerly existed until some disease having occurred they became 
exterminated? Such an epidemic, according to Mr. Gibbs, broke out among the prairie hares 
at Walla-Walla, nearly destroying the species in that vicinity.—S. 
ARCTOMYS FLAYIYENTER, Bach. 
Yellow-footed Marmot, Western Woodchuck. 
Baird, Gcn.lRep., Mammals, 1857, 343. 
In May, 1855, I obtained at Fort Dalles a couple of specimens of the yellow-footed marmot. 
One was an old female, the other a young individual about two-thirds grown. They were 
brought to me alive by an Indian, who stated that he had caught them among the basaltic 
rocks on the Washington Territory side of the Columbia, opposite Fort Dalles, and that in that 
immediate vicinity they are not found on the south side of the river. 
From the appearance of the young individual I should judge that it had been littered about 
the middle of February. I kept them alive for some days in a barrel. They were exceedingly 
wild, and apparently untameably savage. Snarling and snapping whenever the lid of their 
barrel was removed, at the same time uttering a very sharp shrill cry, which Mr. Nuttall would 
have probably described as like chek, chelc. The skin of the female is now preserved in the 
Smithsonian collection; it is much worn, many of the hairs having fallen out, as if she was then 
changing her coat.—S.. 
While in the vicinity of the Straits of Juan de Fuca, in 1855, I bought a quantity of skins 
which appear to belong to an animal the western representative of the woodchuck of the Atlantic. 
All the skins bought want heads and tails, having been sewed into robes. The fur, thick and 
soft, is of a silvery gray on the back. Tail and belly reddish brown. Tail about five or six 
inches long; its hair quite coarse.—G. 
APLODONTIA LEPORINA, Rich. 
Sewellel; the ShowHl of the Nisqually Indians. 
Baird, Gen. Rep., Mammals, 1857, 353. 
Sp. Cn.—Size that of Fiber zibethicus. Tail very short, color reddish brown. Male, length to base of tale, about 13 inches’ 
Tail vertebras, 1. 50. Penis osseous—-knobbed at the extremity and obscurely bifurcated. Testes concealed, no scrotum apparent 
externally. Female slightly smaller. Half-grown young of a brownish lead color. 
I noticed the burrows of the show’tl in 1853, at the top of the main Yakima Pass, in the 
Cascade mountains, at an elevation .of 3,500 feet, and again in 1854, at the Nahchess Pass in 
