38 NATURAL HISTORY ESSAYS 



M. Parzudaki at some period during 1832-43; and 

 Commandant Loche, who published a catalogue of 

 Algerian mammals in 1858, fonnd it at Ain el Ibel. 

 The macroscelides thus became pretty well known as 

 an interesting natural curiosity. Duvernoy even 

 seems to have possessed duplicates, for one of his 

 spirit specimens was acquired by the Leyden 

 Museum only four years after the macroscelides had 

 been discovered. General Vaillant was so interested 

 in these quaint insectivora that he offered rewards 

 for specimens. He was supplied by his Zouaves 

 with other rats upon whose muzzles the tails of their 

 comrades had been grafted ! So well had the fraud 

 been executed that these sham macroscelides were 

 sent unsuspected to Paris before the deception was 

 recognised. Perhaps it was the receipt of these 

 strange counterfeits which prompted the statement, 

 published in a well-known Natural History, that the 

 Algerian jumping shrew had been imported alive 

 into France ! 



The Gazette cies Tribunes gave many years ago a 

 report of a lawsuit brought by a certain M. Triguel 

 against a retired Zouave named Girome, who had 

 defrauded him of a hundred francs (^4) by this hoax. 

 M. Triguel had purchased of the Zouave a "trumpet 

 rat." This beast had on its nose a short trunk 

 containing vertebrae and broader at the summit than 

 the base. Such an "abnormality" — bony as well as 

 muscular and inverted at that — should have put M. 



