70 CATALOGUE. 



active by night than by day, a circumstance clearly provided for by 

 the largeness of their eye, with its extremely convex cornea. They 

 sleep rolled up like a ball; when angered, spit like cats, and, like 

 cats and dogs, drink by lapping with the tongue. They are extremely 

 ferocious and unruly when taken mature, but are apparently very ca- 

 pable of being tamed if caught when young, though the natives of the 

 plains or hills never attempt to subject to discipline their various and 

 high natural endowments. Their cerebral development is much greater 

 than that of the Mangooses, and they have a finer sense of smell but 

 less acute hearing and diurnal vision. When fighting, they grapple 

 with each other like wrestlers, scratching and biting at the same time, 

 but never quitting their hold on the body of the adversary. They are 

 matchless climbers, and derive the extraordinary energy of their double 

 grasp with both hands and feet, whether in scansion or in contests with 

 each other and with their prey, from the high articulation and free la- 

 teral motion of their limbs, the great strength and firm insertion in the 

 large humeri of their pectoral muscles, and from the sharpness and 

 curvature of their very mobile sheathed nails, all points in which they 

 differ remarkably from the Mangooses, and approximate through the 

 Ailuri to the Bears and Cats. Their rapid action is by digital bounds 

 of the feet, palmary of the hands ; their walk, slow, wholly planti- 

 grade, and deliberate, with the head and tail lowered, and the back 

 arched. 



" It is no more shy of inhabited and cultivated tracts than the 

 common Mangoose, or Herpestes griseus, and its favourite resorts are 

 old and abandoned mango groves. In holes of the decayed trunks of 

 the trees, it seeks a place of refuge, making such its ordinary dormi- 

 tory, as well as invariable breeding-place, and even procuring its food 

 almost as much amongst the branches as in the grass which is suffered 

 to grow up in these groves after their cultivation has been laid aside. 

 However rapacious its ordinary habits and those of few of the carni- 

 vora are more so, it feeds freely upon the ripe mango in season, as 

 well as upon other ripe fruits, but its more usual food consists of live 

 birds and of the lesser mammals, the former of which it seizes upon 

 the trees as well as upon the ground, with a more than feline dexterity. 

 It readily kills and devours snakes as well as hares and their young, 

 with mice and rats, but will not touch frogs or blattae. One that I 

 had alive, escaped from confinement, and as soon as the gray of twi- 

 light set in, it made its way into the poultry-yard, climbing a high 

 wall, and killing one goose, two ducks, and seven fowls, in less than 

 an hour! " 



