510 DOMESTIC CATS. 



b€ TjToi juiKpay rj ttjs havrjs kol SpyCKov. Iktls 8^ rj Xeyoiiii/rj aypia ydKr], 

 Koi "O/xr/po? Kpari 8' iTnKTihirjv w? airb rrjs tKTibos tov fc5oi>. 



Thirdly : Strabo's words, iii. 386, quoted by Schneider, 1. e., iii. 

 p. 524, and relating to the taking of rabbits, kqI brj kol yaASs aypCas 

 hs 7] Al^vt) Tpi(f)€L (f)€pov(nv iiTLTrjbh, hs (f)iix(£>aavT€s Tiapiacnv els ras 

 oirds. al S"* e^iXKovaLV e^ca rot? ovv^tv, prove^ I suppose, beyond a 

 question, that yaXrj stood for ferret, Mustela fnro, as well as for 

 the martens, as early as the Christian era. 



Fourthly : as one kind of yakri was known as the TapTrja-aCa yaXij, 

 and as the Scholiasts tell us ^ TapTrjaaCav was used clvtI tov pL€y6,\r]Vf 

 and as Herodotus informs us, iv. 19:^, that yaXai very like these 

 Tartessian (or larger) yaXai were to be seen in Libya, where we know 

 any animal like and larger than a marten would be a viverra, I think 

 we may with some little probability suppose that the TapTTjaa-Ca 

 yaXrj was nothing less or else than the Viverra genetta, which is 

 found all over Africa and also in the South of Spain and France, 

 where it is domesticated even now, here and there, and acts as a 

 tolerable cat. I have not been able to find that this animal is 

 known in Greece, it is not included by Blasius in his ' Saugethiere 

 Mitteleuropas ; ' whence we can the better understand why it was 

 called TapTr}(T(T[a yaXrj ; though it is found in Asia Minor, whither 

 it may have found ^ its way from Egypt. If the Herpestes wid- 

 ringtoni, recently found ^ in the Sierra Morena, had been as well 

 known in the region of Tartessus as the Viverra genetta, its claims 

 to be considered as the Tapr-qa-a-Ca yaXrj would perhaps have been 

 as much greater as its size is. But the Pharaoh's Rat, which 

 would then have been the yaXrj of Herodotus as being the repre- 

 sentative of the Spanish Herpestes, would have been contrasted 

 with it in the point of being considerably smaller, which however 

 is not the case. I append measurements of these and of certain 

 other of the animals of which I have spoken in this paper, the 

 point of size being the point in which the Tartessian or Spanish 

 Marten is contrasted with the commoner one by the Scholiast, and 

 being, as it seems to me, sufficiently great to mask the difference 

 which the lateral and the caudal striping of the Genet also consti- 

 tutes between it and the yaXai of Greece. 



^ See Aristoph. ' Ranae,' ed. Bothe, adnot. ad 1. 440, sub voce. Haprrjaaia /xvpaiva, 

 ibique citata. 



2 Ainsworth, cit. A. Wagner, 'Abhand. Akad. Wiss. Miinchen,' iv. 107. 



3 Gray, ' Ann. and Mag. Nat. Hist.' 1842, ix. 50. 



