Mr. Charles Sheldon informs me that while on a ranch near Chihuahua he at different times kept loose, as pets, a female cougar, three wolves, and several coyotes, all taken when very young. All were exceedingly tame and even affectionate, save at the moment of eating. Mr. W. H. Wright, of Spokane, Wash., is a hunter of wide experience, and has probably made as close a life study of the bear—particularly the grizzly—as anyone now alive. In speaking to me, he dwells on its wide variation in habits, not only as among individuals, but as between all the individuals of one locality when compared with those of another. Thus, in the Big Horn or the Teton Mountains if an animal is killed, he has in his experience found that any grizzly within range is almost sure to come to the carcass (and this has been my experience in the same region). In the Bitter Roots, where the bears live largely on fish, berries and roots, he found the chances just about even whether the bears would or would not come; whereas in the Selkirks, he found that the bears would very rarely pay any attention to a carcass, this being a place where game is comparatively scarce and where there are no salmon, so that the bears live exclusively as vegetarians, save for eating small mammals or insects. In the Bitter Roots Mountains the bears used to live chiefly on fish in the spring and early in the fall; in the summer they fed to a large extent on the shooting star, which grows on all the marshes and is one of the familiar plants of the region, but did not touch either the dog-tooth violet or the spring beauty, both of which have little tubers on the roots. But in the Kootenay country he found that the bears dug up acres and acres of these very dog-tooth violets and spring beauties for the sake of the bulbs on their roots; and that they rarely or never touched the shooting stars. All this illustrates the extreme care which should be taken in making observations and in dogmatizing from insufficient data; and also the absolute necessity, if a full and accurate natural history is to be written, of drawing upon the experience of very many different observers—provided, of course, that they are trustworthy observers.