78 Conies. 



finement, his principal reason for so doing being 

 to discover whether it chewed the cud, and came to 

 the erroneous conclusion that it certainly did so ; 

 but he also had the odd idea that the animal 

 must be carnivorous, and tried sundry experiments 

 in his endeavour to prove this to be the fact, such 

 as shutting it up in a cage with a small chicken, 

 "after omitting feeding him a whole day," and 

 appears to have been surprised when the next 

 morning the chicken was unhurt, " though the 

 ashkoko came to me with great signs of having 

 suffered from hunger/ 7 He gives a description of 

 the animal and its habits as he saw it among 

 the rocks, from which we extract the following 

 passage : " They do not stand upright upon their 

 feet, but seem to steal along as in fear, their belly 

 being nearly close to the ground, advancing a few 

 steps at a time and then pausing. They have 

 something very mild, feeble-like, and timid in their 

 deportment, are gentle and easily tamed, though 

 when roughly handled at first they bite very 

 severely." Those who take an interest in these 

 odd little animals have an opportunity of making 

 the acquaintance of two of them in the flesh, as 

 both H. capensis and H. dorsalis have representa- 

 tives living at the present time in the small 

 mammal house at the Zoo. Descriptions of both 

 of these species can be found in the Proceedings of 

 the Zoological Society. H. capensis was described 

 by Mr. Rudston Read so long ago as 1835, and 

 from his account we gather that he found it living 



