NORTH AMERICA AND THE WEST INDIES 91 



naked. The fur was long and harsh but not spiny and of a 

 dark reddish brown, both above and below. The tail was 

 black at the base, with a white intermediate area and a black 

 tip. Desmarest, however, speaks of the color as lustrous black 

 except for the chin, throat, and base of the tail, which are 

 white. The skull as figured by Trouessart (1885) is provided 

 with a conspicuous bony ridge on each side from the upper 

 anterior edge of the orbit back over the brain case to the lateral 

 corner of the cranium behind. The skull is rather squarely 

 truncate posteriorly; 70 mm. long. 



The St. Lucia musk-rat was slightly smaller, with the greatest 

 length of the skull fron tip of nasals to foramen magnum about 

 49 mm. The color was apparently much the same as in the St. 

 Vincent form, but the belly was nearly wholly brown instead of 

 largely white. 



That the musk-rat occurred on Barbuda to the northward is 

 interesting, for in this extension to the northern Lesser Antilles, 

 there is a certain parallelism in distribution with the agoutis. 

 The Barbuda species, M . audreyae, is based on a lower jaw and 

 an upper incisor tooth found in a cave breccia, which, though 

 presumed to be of Pleistocene age, may not be of any great 

 antiquity. The jaw seems slightly smaller still than that of 

 the St. Lucia musk-rat, and in certain slight details of the last 

 two molars that are preserved shows a less development of the 

 small accessory cusps, or paraconids. 



The Martinique musk-rat was first mentioned in literature 

 by Du Tertre in 1654, in his "Histoire Generale des Isles de S. 

 Christophe, de la Guadeloupe, de la Martinique, et Autres 

 dans I'Amerique." He did not know of it from any of the 

 French islands except Martinique, where, he relates, it was 

 commonly eaten by the people, who, after first singeing off the 

 hair, exposed the body overnight to the air, and then boiled it, 

 throwing off the first water in order to get rid of the strong 

 musky odor. It was said to live in burrows in the ground and 

 against it the colonists waged war on account of its destructive 

 habits in their plantations. In addition to human enemies, 

 the large serpents of Martinique also attacked it. Du Tertre 

 mentions killing a large snake in the stomach of which was one 

 of these rats "almost as big as a cat." Of preserved specimens, 

 there appear to be scarcely above half a dozen. The specimen 

 figured by Geoffrey and Cuvier is a mounted one in the Paris 



