706 



CARNELIAN. 



the eye ; their skull is narrow, and the zygomatic 

 arch is wide and elevated, so as to give room for the 

 powerful muscles which give motion to the lower 

 jaw, the mouth being in most of them the grand 

 instrument in seizing the food, and in all of them the 

 one by which it is more immediately prepared for 

 the stomach. Their food is of a much more nutritious 

 character than that of the vegetable feeders ; and their 

 stomachs are in consequence simpler, and their intes- 

 tinal canals much shorter. 



The sense of smelling is described by Cuvier as 

 being- the most acute which these animals possess ; 

 and some of them have this sense in very wonderful 

 perfection, of which there are remarkable instances 

 in blood-hounds, and other dogs which follow on the 

 scent. Many of them have also very acute sight ; 

 and the nocturnal preyers especially are very quick 

 of hearing. These animals, though, as their food is 

 of much more nutritious quality than that of those 

 which feed upon vegetable matter, they require to 

 take less of it, or at all events to take it less fre- 

 quently, yet requires more address and energy in the 

 capture. The food is endowed with the power of 

 locomotion as well as the feeder, and the prey is 

 endowed with arts and means of escape, as well as 

 the preyer is with arts of capturing. 



It must be borne in mind that, in the system of 

 nature, the war which those predatory animals wage 

 on the other races which are their prey, is not a war 

 of extermination, but a war of preservation ; and 

 that in a state of nature, the ravages of the lion and 

 the wolf, are as much a part of the system as the 

 browsing of the antelope and the sheep. Hence, in 

 the different powers which these predatory animals 

 possess, in the modes and times at which they use 

 them, and in the increase and diminution of the ani- 

 mals themselves, so that they may be always in the 

 most exact proportion to the necessity which there is 

 for them, we have some of the most beautiful in- 

 stances of design, some of the most striking proofs 

 that creation and creation's laws have emanated 

 from an all-wise and almighty Creator, which arc 

 to be found in any part of the system. No doubt 

 the system is equally perfect in all its parts ; but, of 

 course, the more energy is displayed in the work- 

 ing of any part of it, the more forcibly does it draw 

 our attention, and the better is it calculated for 

 enabling those who are just entering upon the study 

 to turn it to the proper account. It would be very 

 delightful here to enter into some details of the 

 structure and the arts of predatory animals, and we 

 are constrained to desist from doing so with no small 

 reluctance and regret ; but it is of far too great mag- 

 nitude for finding a place in a miscellaneous work oi 

 moderate dimensions, in which notices of all the king- 

 doms of nature have to be included. In noticing the 

 subdivisions of the class, in their order in the alpha- 

 bet, we shall, as occasion offers, throw in a few hints 

 and we shall restrict the remainder of this article to 

 list of the families or tribes, into which Cuvier divides 

 this extensive and very interesting order. 



Family first, CHEIROPTERA (winged hands). These 

 may be considered as the link in which may be traced 

 the connexion between the four-handed climbing 

 animals, and the following families of this order 

 They have still many of the characters of the quadru 

 mana the pectoral mammae, the perfect clavicles, the 

 consequent action of the anterior extremities more 

 across the axis of the body than in the direction o" 



t ; and thus they are not adapted for progressive 

 motion on the ground ; but muke their way through 

 he air by means of membranes of flight, put in mo- 

 ion by their anterior extremities. (See CHEIROPTERA 

 and the references from that article.) 



Family second, INSECTIVORA (feeders upon small 

 animals, which are seldom of the warm-blooded 

 classes). They are animals of the earth much in the 

 same way that the first family are animals of the air. 

 They live much under ground, and in cold countries 

 hey are dormant in the winter. Their bodies are 

 n general flat, and their legs short : the anterior ones 

 jeing capable of lateral motions from the possession 

 of clavicles. They are all plantigrade, or walk on 

 the soles of the feet. Their cheek teeth all have 

 sharp conical tubercles ; and in their incisive teeth 

 some of them bear a resemblance to the rodentia, or 

 nawing animals. See INSECTIVORA. 



Family third, CARNIVORA (animals which are, 

 more or less in the habit of killing other warm-blooded 

 animals, and eating their flesh). There are two divi- 

 sions of them, one plantigrade, or walking on the 

 soles of the feet, and another digitigrade, or walking 

 on the toes. They are the animals to which the 

 popular name of " beasts of prey," is given. See 

 CARNIVORA. 



Family fourth, AMPHIBIA (animals which live 

 both in the air, and under water). These animals do 

 not perform the same functions of life in the air and 

 in the water, so as to be equally at home in the one of 

 these, and excluded altogether from the other. There 

 is no known animal that can do this ; for though some 

 water animals, both reptiles and fishes are furnished 

 with apparatus with which they can live a short time 

 on land ; and there are many land animals which can 

 live a short time in water ; yet the water animal can- 

 not bear dry air to come in contact with its gills, 

 neither can the land animal bear to take water into 

 its, lungs, however that water may be impregnated 

 with air. The amphibia are all truly land animals in 

 their breathing, and they merely seek their food, and 

 spend the greater part of their time in the water. 

 See AMPHIBIA. 



Cuvier adds a fifth family, MARSUPIALIA, or animals 

 of which the female is furnished with an abdominal 

 pouch, into which the young are received, after they 

 have been brought forward a longer or shorter time 

 in an internal uterus. In strict propriety, however, 

 these animals cannot be brought into any of the 

 orders of those mammalia which are without the 

 marsupium. Some of them are carnivorous, others 

 feed on vegetable matter ; some browse or nip the 

 green herbage, in a manner not very different from 

 that of ruminating animals, though they are not rumi- 

 nants ; and there are others which, in many of their 

 habits at least, resemble the rodentia, thougn none of 

 them have the proper rodent or gnawing teeth. Inde- 

 pendently of the possession of the marsupium (of 

 which there are many variations as to the degree of 

 its development, and of that of the young when re- 

 ceived into it, there are several general characters, 

 which run through the whole of those animals, and 

 seem to require the formation of them into a distinct 

 sub-class .of mammalia. See MARSUPIALIA. 



CARNELIAN. A mineral forming a sub-species 

 of calcedony. It is the Sarda of Pliny, and does not 

 appear to have possessed its present name till com- 

 paratively modern times. The principal colour of 

 carnelian is blood-red, of all degrees of intensity ; 



