CARNARIA. 63 



ORDER in. 



CARNARIA (a).— CARNIVOROUS ANIMALS. 



This order consists of a considerable and varied assemblage of ungui- 

 culated quadrupeds, possessing, like Man and the Q,uadrumana, tlie three 

 sorts of teeth, but which have no opposable thumb to their fore-feet. 

 Their food is animal, and the more exclusively so, as their grinders are 

 the more trenchant. Those which have them, either wholly or in part 

 tuberculous, live more or less on vegetable substances, and those in which 

 they appear with conical points, live principally on insects. The articu- 

 lation of their lower jaw, having a cross-wise direction, and its parts being 

 combined on the principle of the hinge, is incapable of horizontal motion, 

 and possesses merely the faculty of opening and of closing. 



Their brain has the usual depressions, but it has no third lobe, nor 

 does it lie upon the cerebellum in these animals any more than it does in 

 the families hereafter to be described ; their orbit is not separated from 

 the temporal fossa in the skeleton, the cranium is narrowed and the zygo- 

 matic arches widened and raised, in order to give more strength and vo- 

 lume to the muscles of their jaws. Their predominant sense is that of 

 smell, and their pituitary membrane is generally spread over numerous 

 bony lamina?. The fore-arm has the power of rotating in nearly all of 

 them, although with less facility than in the Quadrumana, and they never 

 have in the fore-feet thumbs opposable to the other toes. Their intes- 

 tines are less in volume in consequence of the substantial nature of their 

 food, and in order to prevent the putrefaction which flesh would necessa- 

 rily experience in being kept too long in a canal of great length. 



Besides, their forms and minute portions of their organization vary 

 considerably, and are the source of analogous varieties in their habits, and 

 to a degree which makes it impossible to arrange their genera upon one 

 common scale, so that it becomes indispensable to form them into several 

 families, which are variously connected together by multiplied relations. 



^^ (a) From some experiments recently performed in the Zoological Gardens in 

 Regent's Park, it would appear that Carnivorous Mammalia fed with two meals a 

 day, are by no means in such good condition as those which have tTio same quantity 

 of flesh in one meal only. Two Leopards were chosen for the first expeiiment. 

 One, which weighed 91 lbs., was fed in the usual manner, on 41bs. of beef every day 

 in one meal — the other, which weighed 100^ lbs., was supplied mth the same quan- 

 tity of beef, but one-half was given in the morning and the other half in the even- 

 ing. After an interval of five weeks, during which the animals were fed in this way, 

 they were weighed; when it was found that, whilst the Leopard that had his food all 

 at once, gained lib. in weight; the other lost gib., and his temper became very 

 much worse. Two Hyaenas were subjected to a similar experiment, which was at- 

 tended with pretty nearly the same results. — En(;. Ed. 



