xii THE ORDER FERAL 163 



zoologists, although it may be mentioned as an example of the 

 tendency towards excessive and unnecessary multiplication of 

 generic names which exists in some quarters, that it has been 

 divided into as many as fourteen. 3. Viverra, a heterogeneous 

 group, containing ichneumons, coatis, and skunks, animals 

 belonging to three very distinct families, according to modern 

 ideas. 4. Mustela, a far more natural group, being nearly 

 equivalent to the modern family Mustelidce ; and, lastly, a 

 very comprehensive genus Ursus, consisting of U. meles, the 

 badger, U. lotor, the raccoon, 17. luscus, the wolverene, and all 

 the true bears known, comprised in the single species U. arctos. 

 Many interesting forms of Carnivora, as Cryptoprocta, Proteles, 

 Eupleres, Ailurus, and Ailuropus, have no place in the 

 Linnasan system, being comparatively modern discoveries. 

 The very recent date (1869) at which the last-named remark- 

 able animal was made known to science by the enterprising 

 researches of the Abbe David into the Fauna of Eastern 

 Thibet, gives hope that we may not yet be at the end of the 

 discovery of even large and hitherto unsuspected forms of 

 existing mammals. 



Next in the Linnsean system comes the genus Didelphys, 

 constituted for the reception of five species of American 

 opossums. This is a very interesting landmark in the history 

 of the progress of the knowledge of the animal life of the 

 world, as these five opossums, forming a genus in the midst 

 of the order FER^E, were all that was then known of the great 

 sub-class Marsupialia, now constituting a group entirely apart 

 from the ordinary members of the class. It is difficult now 

 to imagine an animal world without kangaroos, without wom- 

 bats, without phalangers, without thylacines, without dasyures, 

 and so many other familiar forms, and yet such was the 

 animal world known to Linnaeus. It is true that a species 

 of kangaroo from one of the islands of the Austro-Malayan 

 Archipelago was described as long ago as 1714 by De Bruyn, 

 who saw it alive at the house of the Dutch governor of 

 Batavia, and that Captain Cook and Sir Joseph Banks saw 

 and killed kangaroos on the east coast of Australia in 1770, 

 and had published figures and descriptions of them in 1773, 

 or five years before the death of Linnaeus ; but the work 



