Descriptions of East Asiatic Mammals 59 
the important difference that they eat roaches and other vermin 
instead of stored foods. They give off a musky odor, which is 
highly obnoxious. They were once believed to spoil bottled wine 
by merely running over the bottles. Such bottles of wine were 
rejected as "musk-ratty." Trying to refute this fable, the 
naturalist Sterndale states that after he had driven one of these 
Shrews back and forth a number of times across a clean hand- 
kerchief he could detect no smell of musk on the cloth. He 
taught one of the Shrews to come when he whistled and take 
grasshoppers from his fingers — "it seemed very short sighted, 
and did not notice the insect till quite close to my hand, when, 
with a short swift spring, it would pounce upon its prey." 
This kind of Shrew is reputed to be no other than Chuchun- 
dra, "who never comes out in the middle of the floor . . . but 
always creeps around by the wall," in Kipling's famous tale 
Rikki-tikki-tavi, in which story the mongoose and the cobra 
fight it out. 
The Pygmy House Shrews, S uncus perrottetii and rela- 
tives, are the smallest crocidurine Shrews in Asia. They agree 
with the large type of Suncus in possession of the extra uni- 
cuspid tooth. Their English name may be a misfit, since we do 
not know certainly that they enter houses like their larger allies. 
They are mouse-colored above and below, with the feet and 
hands grayish white. The tail is whitish basally, darker towards 
the tip, its underside whitish. The length of head and body 
varies from 1% to l%o inches, of the tail from 1 to 1% inches, 
of the hind foot from % to % inch. This type of Shrew seems 
restricted to India and the area which includes Burma and Indo- 
China. The form found in Tenasserim at the base of the Malay 
Peninsula is named nudipes, and malayanus from peninsular 
Siam may be identical. A mountain-dwelling species, specimens 
of which have been found in numbers dead on the snow of the 
eastern Himalayas, is variously called micronyx (from Lan- 
dour) and pygmceoides (from "Himalayas"). Although its size 
