THE STORY OF THE CIVET. 



323 



is very destructive, killing any birds or small animals it can capture, and 

 often attacking fowls, ducks, etc., but also feeding on snakes, frogs, insects, 

 eggs, and on fruits and some roots. Civets take readily to water. 



The palm-civets are only abroad at night and live almost entirely in trees. 

 Their food is in part animal and part vegetable substances. 



Of the various families of true palm-civets, five are found in India and 

 Burma. In eight of these the tail is considerably more than half the length 

 of the head and body; and in seven of these it is uniformly-colored. The 

 Celebes palm-civet, forming the eighth of this series, is, however, distin- 

 guished by having its tail banded with indistinct rings of darker and lighter 

 brown. The imperfectly-known woolly palm-civet of Thibet differs from 



AN AFRICAN AND AN INDIAN CIVET. 



all the rest in the woolly nature of its fur, and also by the length of the tail 

 not exceeding that of the head and body. 



The best known of all is the Indian palm-civet, found throughout the 

 greater part of India and Ceylon. The general color of the coarse and some- 

 what ragged fur is a blackish or brownish-gray, without any stripes across 

 the back in fully adult individuals. The length of the head and body of a 

 male measured by me was twenty-two and one-half inches, and that of the 

 tail nineteen and one-half inches; the corresponding dimensions of a female 

 being in one instance twenty and seventeen and one-half inches, while in a 

 second both were about eighteen inches. 



This species lives much on trees, especially on the cocoanut palms, and 



