ZOOLOGY. 
47 
localities, and its characteristic track observed in almost every place to which game resorted to 
drink. It is, however, less abundant on the Pacific slope than is the eastern species in most 
parts of the valley of the Mississippi; being confined to the wooded districts, and found most 
abundantly in the foot hills of the Sierra Nevada, in California. Considerable numbers are sold 
in the San Francisco market, to he eaten, commanding a price of from one to three dollars each. 
I could not learn that the skin was ever made an article of traffic in California. I saw a number 
of raccoons in confinement in San Francisco, all of which exhibited precisely the movements, 
the habits, the attitudes, and the temper of the eastern raccoon, and I noticed no striking 
peculiarity of form or color. 
Specimens were obtained in the San Francisco market. 
URSUS HORRIBILIS, 0 r d . 
* 
Grizzly Bear. 
Ursus horribilis, Ord, Guthrie’s Geography, 2d Am. Ed. II, 1815, 291, 299. 
Baird, Gen. Rep. Mammals, 1857, 219. 
Ursus ferox, (“Lewis & Clark,”) Richardson, F. B. A. I, 1829, 24; pi. i. 
Add. & Bach, N. A. Quad. Ill, 1853, 141; pi. cxxxi 
Sp. Ch.—S ize very large. Tail shorter than ears. Hair coarse, darkest near the base, with light tips. An erect mane 
between the shoulders. Feet very large ; fore claws twice as long as the hinder ones. A dark dorsal stripe from occiput to 
tail, and another lateral one on each side along the flanks, obscured and nearly concealed by the light tips ; intervals be¬ 
tween the stripes lighter. All the hairs on the body brownish-yellow or hoary at tips. Region around ears dusky ; legs 
nearly black. Muzzle pale, without a darker dorsal stripe. 
To the westward of the Rocky mountain range, the grizzly bear seems to have appropriated 
to himself the southern of our Pacific provinces, leaving the more northern territories to his less 
powerful congeners, the black and brown hears. The reasons for this peculiar distribution of 
species are not very obvious, but it is evidently an exhibition of that system in nature which 
provides by giving a wide range of habit to the different animals for the development of a large 
amount of animal life in every important division of the almost infinitely varied surface of the 
earth. That the habitat of the grizzly is not determined by temperature we know, for his thick 
and shaggy coat affords a better defence against cold than the finer and thinner fur of the black 
bear, and in the Rocky mountains the range of the grizzly extends at least as far north as the 
line of the British possessions. 
Differences in the food of the two species, where the food is so nearly identical, seem hardly 
adequate to account for their distribution. It appears to me rather to turn on the more sylvan 
habit of the black bear, his greater aptness at climbing, and his evident preference for a country 
covered by a heavy growth of timber. He is the bear of the forest, while the grizzly is the bear 
of the u chapparalthe latter choosing an open country, whether plain or mountain, whose 
surface is covered with dense thickets of “ manzanita,” or scrub oak—which furnish him with 
his favorite food—and clumps of service hushes and low cherry, and whose streams are bordered 
by tangled thickets of grape vines and wild plum. 
Whatever the cause, the fact is unquestionable, that west of the Rocky mountains the grizzly 
bear becomes very rare after passing the parallel of 42°. They are rather unpleasantly abundant 
in many parts of the Coast Range, and Sierra Nevada, in California, where large numbers are 
annually killed by the hunters, and where not a few of the hunters are annually killed by the 
hears. About Sliingletown and McCumber’s flat, northeast of Fort Reading, and around the 
