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Show 682 LIEUT.-COL. J. BIDDULPH ON THE [June 16, and hair are speckled and shorter than a Stag's, but its hoof is round, and cleft as an Ox's. Their flesh is very tender and delicious." It is also mentioned by other Spanish writers on California of that period. The species then appears to have been lost sight of by naturalists of the 18th century. The only one to allude to it was Pennant, who, as I have already mentioned, calls it a variety of Mouflon. In November 1800, an adventurous Scotchman, named MacGillivray, exploring in the Rocky Mountains along the Bow River, killed several in lat. 50°. He had apparently never heard of the animal before, and found little difficulty in shooting them. In 1803 MacGillivray's account was published, with a woodcut, by Dr. Mitchill, in the ' New York Medical Repository.' A specimen procured by MacGillivray was given at the same time to the New- York Museum. In the same year a description, transcribed from the New-York account, was published in Paris by E. Geoffroy de St.- Hilaire, with a woodcut from a drawing of the New-York specimen. The cut is almost identical with the one published in N ew York, but is larger. No name beyond that of Belier de montaigne is assigned to it by Geoffroy. In or about 1804 an account of the species was published in vol. xv. of Shaw's 'Naturalist's Miscellany,' with a figure and the name of Ovis canadensis. The figure is coloured, but with this exception and the addition of a background it is scarcely to be distinguished from a reversed copy of Geoffroy's figure. Shaw, however, mentions that a specimen is in the British Museum, and makes no allusion to MacGillivray, so that it would appear that he was ignorant of the New-York publication. The exact date of Shaw's publication cannot be verified. There are twenty-four volumes in the series, the first of which was published in 1790, and the last in 1813, but the intermediate volumes are not dated. It is fair to suppose that one volume was published every year, and that the fifteenth was published in 1804. In 1817 Cuvier mentions it as " probably a kind of Argali that had crossed on the ice from Asia," under the name of Ovis montana, and refers to a figure by Schreber. Schreber's work was not published till 1836, but some of the plates were issued earlier. The work contains two figures of O. montana, one of them being a coloured copy of Richardson's figure in the * Fauna Boreali-Americana,' which was published after Cuvier's work ; it is therefore evidently the former figure, which is only a reproduction of Geoffroy's, to which Cuvier refers. It is impossible to say by whom the specific name of montana was first conferred on this Sheep. It is assigned by different writers to Geoffroy, Cuvier, and Desmarest; but the name appears to have been used by Schreber before either of the two latter, and is assigned by him to Geoffroy. From other references it would appear that the name has been erroneously assigned to Geoffroy, and was probably first employed by Schreber for Geoffroy's figure, the date of Schreber's republication of which is unknown, Geoffroy's name being turned into Latin. In 1818, Desmarest, referring to MacGillivray's account, gave the specific name cervina to the Bighorn. But in his ' Mammalogie,' published two |
