226 FLORIDA GEOLOGICAL SURVEY-I3TH ANNUAL REPORT

supposed to range only f rom the Suwannee and St. Mary's Rivers to DeSoto County, but other forms differing very little from it
range northeastward to the Savannah River in Georgia and the Varrior and Tombigbee in Alabama; and there are many other species of Gcomys and related genera west of the Mississippi
River. Like some of its western relatives, it performs an important service in stirring up the soil, as indicated in the chapter on soils; but unlike some others, it does very little damage to crops.*
 The manatee or sea-cow (Trichechits Manatus or Manatus
Americanus), was doubtless formerly common on our coasts, but being practically defenseless it has been hunted for sport or for curiosity until it is nearly extinct. Whales are occasionally stranded on our shores.
 Among extinct mammals may be mentioned the elephant, mastodon, bison, camel, rhinoceros, tapir, sloth, armadillo, and some relatives of the horse, all of which roamed over what is now the phosphate country in Pliocene or Pleistocene time, which was only yesterday geologically speaking.
 Birds. The study of birds is more popular with amateurs than is that of mammals, and it is possible to give some rather detailed information about them, culled mostly from Frank M. Chapman's Handbook of Birds of Eastern North America.t It appears from that that the number of species (not counting subspecies) that can be seen -in central Florida at one season or another is between 200 and 250, or a little more than half of all that are known in eastern

 *The distribution of the southeastern salamanders, as indicated by their "hills," was discussed in Science for January 19, 1912; but up to the present time, nine years later, the writer has never seen one of the animals. The soil-making activities of one of the Great Plains species were described by Ernest Thompson Seton in the Century Magazine for June, 1904.
 tThere is more than one edition, but the latest seen by the writer was copyrighted in 1912, and is a duodecimo with xxix 530 pages, a double-page colored "life-zone" map of North America, a double-page color chart, 24 plates (some of them colored), and 136 text-figures. Toward the end there is a bibliography arranged by states, containing several references to the area
-under consideration.