26 NORTH AMERICAN MUSTE^J4^.: 



^pjgne&(d^fiirq'0y%u4 ^i^Bp'a>4k>b iikiron, transferred by the Span- 

 ish cdiouists to the South American GaUctis vittata, and the 

 North American Mustela huro Fr. Guv., ?iudfuretiis of the Em- 

 peror Frederick II, considered as French by Albertus Magnus, 

 with which the present French furet, English ferret, Celtic 

 f lived and fearaid, German frett, are all related. The -et may be 

 a diminutive form, or be a part of the original word ; it is 

 slighted by the etymologist Isidor, who somewhat gratuitously 

 finds in it the Latin /i(r, thief. The word cannot be Arabic, for 

 Isidor died in 636, before the irruption of the Arabs into Africa. 

 But if, as Shaw states, the Weasel is caWedfert in Barbary, the 

 probability is that the word, like others, is common to the North 

 African pre- Arabic and the Iberian pre-Eomanic languages, and 

 that it is this very animal which Strabo calls the North African 

 (Libyan) Weasel.* 



WiESEL [Putorius vulgaris], — This word is found in most of 

 the Germanic languages: Swedish tvessla; English tveesel or 

 weasel; Dutch tcezel. It may be traced back to late mediaeval 

 German and Anglo-Saxon. The Swabian verb wuseln^ to skip 

 about {'^sich rasch bewegen^^) like any small creature, may 

 readily be derived from wiesely notwithstanding the difference 

 in the vowel. In this case again, as in the instance of dachs, 

 the same word recurs in Spanish, but without the diminutive 

 termination, as veso. It is found in mediaeval Latin of the 

 twelfth century, and was by the Eomanic colonists bestowed 

 upon an American Musteline animal {Putorius visoii, the repre- 

 sentative of the European Mink). The ordinary French term 

 for the Weasel, helette, is diminutive of the old French hele, 

 from the Celtic and the present Welch bela, a marten, and also 

 occurs under a different modification in North Italy, which 

 was certainly once inhabited by Celts. It may all the more 

 readily have been preserved in French, since it may be con- 

 sidered related to helle^ pretty, and be so interpreted. Certainly 

 in many languages the Weasel derives its name from its neat 

 and elegant ways, as the Italian donnola and Portuguese 

 doninha, little lady; the Spanish comadreja, god-mother; the 



* According to Rolleston ( Journ. Auat. and Phys. i. 1867, p. 47 seq.) the Cat 

 and the Marten were both domesticated in Italy nine hundred years before 

 the period of the Crusades, and the latter, Mustela foina, was the "cat" or 

 yak^ of the ancients, who, furthermore, called Mustela martes yaXf; aypia, and 

 designated Viverra genetta as Taprr/caia ya'/j). — Tk. 



