Raccoon 
compelled to go hungry, and, like the other hibernating beasts, they 
lose flesh rapidly during the spring months, though the omnivo- 
rous nature of their appetites gives them a decided advantage 
over the woodchucks and the rest of the vegetable eaters in the 
general scramble for food. 
It is curious that the quaint custom of washing meat of all 
kinds before eating it should be clung to so religiously by the 
raccoons of all parts of the country. Raccoons are so_ easily 
domesticated and prove such amusing pets that accounts of tame 
coons are to be picked up almost anywhere, and although ex- 
hibiting plenty of originality in most ways, they all seem to agree 
in this one particular: that when meat is offered them it must 
be thoroughly washed or else eaten only under protest appar- 
ently, many a coon preferring to go hungry rather than eat flesh 
which it has not first been allowed to wash. Moreover, they 
are not willing to let any one else do the work for them, insist- 
ing rather on being allowed to do it all themselves, holding their 
food in both fore paws and sousing it about in the water until 
it is reduced to a pallid, flabby, unappetizing mess which only a 
coon could look upon without misgiving. 
Tne latin title /ofor, as well as the names applied to this 
species by both German and French naturalists, and I think by 
some of the Indian tribes of this country, have reference to this 
washing habit. 
The coon never has, and probably never will achieve, that 
fame and popularity in the North which it holds in the South. 
It undoubtedly owes the position which it holds. there to the 
peculiar mixture of insight and imagination with which the negro 
observes the wild things about him, looking upon them as little 
wild people dwelling in the woods and fields as best they may, 
and hardly differing from his own race except as he himself 
differs from the whites; the raccoon to them is ‘‘ brother coon” 
and the rabbit ‘‘brother rabbit.” 
Before the war, the white children on the Southern planta- 
tions obtained most of their Knowledge of natural history from 
the slaves, and although they received real facts and quaint negro 
ideas and superstitions wonderfully blended, | am convinced that 
with it all they got an appreciation of the true innerselves of 
the little beasts not to be obtained from books or any amount 
of the scientific research of the trained naturalists. 
353 
