GOLUNDA. 343 
DESCRIPTION. —Jerdon says of this mouse that he has found it in 
gravelly soil in gardens and woods in most parts of Southern India, 
making a small burrow, which generally has a little heap of stones 
placed at a short distance from the hole. It is preyed on now and then 
by the common Indian roller or jay, and it is very generally used as a 
bait to catch that bird with bird-lime. 
GENUS GOLUNDA. 
The following rats are separated by Gray as a distinct genus, which 
from the Canarese name of the type he has called Golunda, the charac- 
teristics of which are: “the grinders, when perfect, low, with a broad, 
flat crown ; the cross ridges of the crown of the upper grinders divided 
into three * distinct slightly raised tubercles ; upper incisors grooved ; 
rest like AZus.” 
No. 378. GOLUNDA ELLIOTI. 
The Bush Rat or Coffee Rat ( Jerdon’s No. 199). 
Native Names.—Gulandi, Canarese; Gulat-yelka of Wuddurs; 
Sorapanji-gadur, Telegu of Yanadees ; ‘Cofee-waitec-meeyo, Si nghalese 
(this name seems to me a corruption of “coffee rat aos 
DeEscriptTion.—Fur thick and stiff, fulvous brown, mixed with black, 
some olive brown mixed with fulvous, tawny grey beneath ; hairs of 
upper parts flattened, ashy grey, tipped yellow, with some thinner and 
longer ones, also tipped yellow, with sub-terminal black band ; under fur 
soft and of a light lead colour; face and cheeks rough ; ears moderate, 
sub-ovate, hairy; tail round, tapering, scaly and ‘hairy, dark brown 
above, yellowish below ; cutting teeth yellow. 
Si1ze.—Head and body, 44 inches ; tail, 4 inches, 
Dr. Kellaart says these are the rats most destructive to coffee-trees, 
whole plantations being sometimes deprived of buds and blossoms by 
them. 
There is an illustration of one in Sir Emerson Tennent’s ‘ Natural 
History of Ceylon’ in the act of cutting off the slender branches which 
would not bear its weight in order to feed on the buds and blossoms 
when fallento the ground. “The twigs thus destroyed are detached by 
as clean a cut as if severed with a knife.” Sir Walter Elliot writes of 
it: “The gu/andi lives entirely in the jungle, choosing its habitation 
in a thick bush, among the thorny branches of which, or on the ground, 
it constructs a nest of elastic stalks and fibres of dry grass thickly inter- 
woven. The nest is of a round or oblong shape, from six to nine inches 
in diameter, within which is a chamber about three or four inches in 
diameter, in which it rolls itself up. Round and through the bush are 
sometimes observed small beaten pathways along which ‘the little animal 
