118 THE WEASEL-HEADED ARMADILLO. 



with incredible agility. It possesses great strength, and runs 

 with considerable swiftness ; notwithstanding it has the broad- 

 est, flattest, and least agile form of any of the genus. 



Besides devouring roots and grain, this species is insectivo- 

 rous ; it penetrates and overturns the firmest and strongest 

 ant-hills, and wherever it abounds does great service to the 

 neighbourhood by clearing it of the destructive insects whose 

 united labours construct those remarkable habitations. It 

 also acts as scavenger, and will devour any carrion. If a 

 horse or mule dies, the armadillo penetrates the carcase where 

 the integument most readily gives way, burrows beneath it, 

 and devours the whole of the flesh without making any other 

 breach in the skin than that by which it entered. 



M. Fr. Cuvier makes the following observations on an ar- 

 madillo closely allied to this species, which lived for many 

 years in the Menagerie at the Garden of Plants in Paris. "If 

 we were to judge of the intellectual faculties of the species 

 by the individual now under consideration, we should con- 

 clude that the Encoubert possesses them in a very limited 

 degree. When he is set at liberty, he goes running to the 

 right and to the left, digging in one corner, and then sud- 

 denly stopping to run and scratch in another. A sudden 

 noise startles him ; he stops to listen, but he does not seem 

 to perceive the presence of a new object, nor to distinguish 

 a person from a stone ; when he runs, he goes indiscrimi- 

 nately against everything in his way, and passes over it or by 

 the side of it, with equal indifference whether the obstacle be 

 a piece of wood or an animal. His indifference in this respect 

 is such that I should be inclined to attribute it only to his 

 inexperience, to the continual slavery in which he had lived, 

 and to the habit he had contracted of being touched and 

 carried about in the hand from one place to another. But he 

 never learnt to distinguish the hand that fed him, and re- 

 mained as unfamiliar with the person who had the care of 

 him, as with any other individual. In this respect I cannot 

 compare him better than to the animals of the lower classes ; 

 yet there are even among the insects some which seem to 

 have received the faculty of judging and of discriminating in 

 a higher degree than this animal." — Hist, des Mammif. 



We have observed the same habits, the same unceremoni- 

 ous manner of running against or over anything that stood 

 in their way, whether a rabbit, or another of their own spe- 

 cies, in specimens living at the Surrey Zoological Gardens. A 

 smaller variety of Dasypus mustelinus, or a species nearly 

 allied to it, has attracted considerable notice at the Gardens 

 in the Regent's Park during the preceding year. The mode 



