northward across a vast treeless waste to the bleak and inhospitable
shores of the Great Slave Lake itself. It is more than probable that had
the bison remained unmolested by man and uninfluenced by him, he would
eventually have crossed the Sierra Nevadas and the Coast Range and taken
up his abode in the fertile valleys of the Pacific slope.

Had the bison remained for a few more centuries in undisturbed
possession of his range, and with liberty to roam at will over the North
American continent, it is almost certain that several distinctly
recognizable varieties would have been produced. The buffalo of the hot
regions in the extreme south would have become a short-haired animal
like the gaur of India and the African buffalo. The individuals
inhabiting the extreme north, in the vicinity of Great Slave Lake, for
example, would have developed still longer hair, and taken on more of
the dense hairyness of the musk ox. In the "wood" or "mountain buffalo"
we already have a distinct foreshadowing of the changes which would have
taken place in the individuals which made their permanent residence upon
rugged mountains.

It would be an easy matter to fill a volume with facts relating to the
geographical distribution of _Bison americanus_ and the dates of its
occurrence and disappearance in the multitude of different localities
embraced within the immense area it once inhabited. The capricious
shiftings of certain sections of the great herds, whereby large areas
which for many years had been utterly unvisited by buffaloes suddenly
became overrun by them, could be followed up indefinitely, but to little
purpose. In order to avoid wearying the reader with a mass of dates and
references, the map accompanying this paper has been prepared to show at
a glance the approximate dates at which the bison finally disappeared
from the various sections of its habitat. In some cases the date given