412 JOURNAL, BOMBAY NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY, Vol. XVI. 



side by the general body colour, and that tou at a point where it is 

 commencing to pale down to the meeting line with the belly colour, 

 seems often faint but is always discernible. There is no band of 

 short, rufous hairs along the midrib under the tail as there is in 

 palmarum. All the tail hairs are long, and ringed black and white 

 as in the upper tail hairs of palmarum. 



Pennant gives no locality for the specimen he describes ; he says 

 however " Governor Loten did me the favour of informing; me that it 

 lived much in the coco trees and was very fond of ' sury ' or palm 

 wine, which is procured from this tree, from which it obtained the 

 name of ' suricatsje ' or the little cat of the ' sury.' " I have failed to 

 identify the ' Governor Loten' mentioned in this extract, but ' Hobson 

 Jobson ' gives ' sury ', or ' soure ' as a name used for toddy by 

 Tavernier (1663) and de la Boullaye le Gouz (1650). The latter cer- 

 tainly wrote from Surat so I think we may accept Guzerath as the 

 home of Pennants' Palm Squirrel. I have, therefore, taken the specimen 

 obtained by me in the Mandvi Taluka of the Surat District as the type 

 of a new species which I have named after the eminent English 

 Zoologist Pennant who first described it. 



The following table gives the skull measurements of the type d 

 pennantii as compared with the Guzerath specimen of palmarum which 

 I obtained at the same time and with a form from Rawalpindi : — 



Funambulus pennantii argentescens, sub. sp. n. 



The pattern of the colouration is identical with that of typical 

 pennantii ; it is much paler however and almost all rufous tint has dis- 

 appeared, the general body colour is a pale French grey and the stripes 



