n a
bison and a buffalo; and which is the American animal?"

The interest which so many people find in questions such as this must
serve as a justification for the present paper, which proposes no more
than to put into concise form what is known of the zoological relations
of the animals which come within the special interest of the Boone and
Crockett Club. In doing this, conclusions must, as a rule, be stated
with few of the facts upon which they rest, for to give more than the
plainest of these would be to far outrun the possible limits of space,
and would furthermore lead into technical details which to most readers
are obscure and wearisome.

[Illustration: BULL BISON.]

Anyone who consults Dr. Johnson's famous dictionary will be illuminated
by the definition of camelopard: "An Abyssinian animal taller than an
elephant, but not so thick," and even but a few years back all that was
considered necessary to answer the question, "what is a bison?" was to
state that it is a wild ox with a shaggy mane and a hump on its
shoulders, and the thing was done; but in our own time a satisfactory
answer must take account of its relationship to other beasts, for we
have come to believe that the differences between animals are simply the
blank spaces upon the chart of universal life, against which are traced
the resemblances, which, as we follow them back into remote periods of
geologic time, reveal to us definite lines of succession with structural
change, and these, correctly interpreted, are nothing less than actual
lines of blood relationship. To know what an animal is, therefore, we
must know something of its family tree.

It is perhaps well to emphasize the need of correct interpretation, for
there are no bridges on the paths of palaeontology, and as we go back,
more than one great gap occurs between series of strata, marking periods
of intervening time which there is no means of measuring, but during
which we know that the progress of change in the animals then living
never ceased. When such a break is reached, the course of phylogeny is
like picking up an interrupted trail, with the additional complication
that the one we find is never quite like the one we left, and it is in
such conditions that the systematist must apply his knowledge of the
general progressive tendencies through the ages of change, to the
determination of the particular changes he should expect to find in the
special case before him, and so be enabled