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Show 330 MR. R. BROWN ON THE MAMMALS OF GREENLAND. [May 2b, 3. On the Mammalian Fauna of Greenland. By ROBERT B R O W N , F.R.G.S. &c. &c. [Communicated by Dr. James Murie.] CONTENTS. 1. History of the Subject, p. 330. 4. Notes on Synonymy and Habits of the 2. Systematic Distribution, p. 333. terrestrial Species, p. 34c5. 3. Geographical Distribution, p. 337. 5. Doubtful and Mythical Species, p. 6oi. I. History of the Subject. In entering upon a review of the Greenlandic species of Mammalia, it may be a matter of surprise to some that anything remains to be said concerning the larger animals of a country so comparatively near home, and regarding which so much has been written, where Egede, Fabricius, Vahl, and Rink lived, and regarding which we possess the remarks of such excellent naturalists as the acute authors of the * Fauna Grcenlandica' and ** Gronland Geographisk og Statistisk.' Between the dates of the publication of these two works an interval of upwards of seventy years extends, so that one might suppose that any errors of the first work might have been fully discovered in the interval and corrected in the second. All surprise vanishes, however, when we find that the contrary holds true, and that to-day we know almost as little about the Mammals of Greenland as we did when Fabricius gave us the first systematic account of them. The fact of the matter is that naturalists who have visited Greenland have been too much interested in other departments of natural history to pay attention to the larger members of the fauna, or have supposed that there was nothing worth adding to or (what is just as important) subtracting from it. Accordingly, we find all authors on Arctic animals merely contenting themselves with giving a list of Fabricius's species, and at the same time perpetuating the errors which he fell into through ignorance or credulity, independently of the fact that he only wrote of that limited portion of the country then inhabited by the natives over which his authority as a " Gronlandske Missionair " extended. Can we therefore be astonished if we find the fauna of Greenland, in the class Mammalia, burdened with species which have no existence save in the vivid imagination of the Eskimo or the overlearned acuteness of zoologists, and bereft of others which ought to take their place-their history poisoned with fables only worthy of the belief of the last century, and their geographical range in the country over which they are distributed scarcely touched on, or wrongly described. The accounts of the older writers on Greenland (E°-ede-Saabye Cranz, &c.) were very unsatisfactory; but a new era in the history of northern zoology dawned when Otto Fabricius, who had passed several years in Greenland as a Missionary, published his ' Fauna Grcenlandica'*. This work, far in advance of its age, and which for the conciseness and accuracy of its descriptions has rarely been surpassed, has most deservedly retained its place as our standard au- * Hafnia? et Lipsia-, 1780. |