As a matter of fact, I am by no means prepared to doubt all their stories. There are unquestionably some exceptional monsters met with now and again, but too many of those instanced have been described merely from the impression made on the hunter’s mind by the sight of a gigantic track which has spread in soft snow or mud. The largest grizzly of which I have had anything like trustworthy information in my own wanderings was shot in Alaska, at English Bay, Kodak Island, by Mr. J. C. Tolman, now Customs officer at Wrangel. As Mr. Tolman allows his name to appear, and as he enjoyed an enviable reputation for veracity among men who had known him for years, I give the dimensions of his big bear as he gave them to me, extracted from notes made in his diary at the time at which he killed him. The bear was killed only a few miles from a settlement, and was actually weighed, turning the scales at 1,656 lbs. dead weight not cleaned; his hide when freshly skinned measured 13 ft. 6 ins. from nose to anus; from ear to ear he measured 13 ins.; from poll to nose, 20 ins.; the length of the hind-foot was 18 ins., and the breadth of the forefoot 12 ins. He was killed by a single shot in the head from a Winchester rifle. The largest bear which I have myself shot was also an Alaskan, but infinitely smaller than the above; still, even this bear gave four strong men all they could do, with a rope round her neck, to drag her, when dead, down a sloping mud bank into a canoe laid over on its side to receive her. Her forearm, when skinned, measured 23 ins., fair measurement, the tape being stretched as tight as it would go. The Indians put this bear at from 1,000 to 1,500 lbs., and I dare say she really weighed nearly 800 or possibly 900 lbs., but I am no judge of an animal’s weight, and had no means of weighing her. I have myself measured skins in Mr. Boscowitz’s store at Victoria (also brought down from Alaska) which measured 9 ft. 10 ins. from end to end, but then some 6 ins. must be allowed for on all American skins, as they are skinned up the hind legs in such a way as to give quite that length of hide beyond the anus. Of course, too, a skin may be so laced and strained upon its frame in skinning as to stretch it a good deal beyond its natural dimensions. In Colorado the bears appear to be mostly silver-tips, and if you can rely upon the verdict of the local hunters whom I met (and I have no reason to doubt their word) a Colorado silver-tip weighing 600 lbs. would be a big bear.