THE WEASEL. 227 



collected impurities. Authors of former days have sent down to us 

 some of the most extravagant opinions concerning quadrupeds that can 

 possibly be imagined ; whilst divers writers of the present time are 

 so little versed in the real habits of these animals, as not to know 

 whether or not such opinions ought to be condemned and rejected 

 as totally unfit for a work of merit. Booksellers may engage a per- 

 son to write for them ; but, depend upon it, his zoological lucubra- 

 tions will be a mere ignis fatuus^ unless he shall have studied pre- 

 viously, in the field of nature, the habits of those animals which he 

 has undertaken to describe. And where are we to find a naturalist, 

 now-a-days, who has not had too much recourse to books ? books 

 which are replete with errors and absurdities, merely for want of proper 

 investigation on the part of those who have written them. Many of 

 the weasel tribe have the power of emitting a very disagreeable odour 

 from the posterior part of the body. We are gravely informed in 

 the " American Biography of Birds," that the polecat has this faculty 

 " given him by nature as a defence." And, pray, at what old granny's 

 fireside in the United States has the writer of this picked up such an 

 important piece of information? How comes the polecat to be 

 aware that the emitted contents of a gland,* inoffensive to itself, 

 should be offensive to all its pursuers ? I say, inoffensive to itself, 

 because I cannot believe that our Creator would condemn an un- 

 offending animal to produce its own punishment by means of a smell 

 which never leaves it whether it roam up and down as a solitary 

 animal, or whether it have a partner and a family of young ones to 

 provide for. Although this odour from individuals of the weasel 

 tribe is very distressing to our own nasal sensibilities, it by no means 

 follows that the scent should have a similar effect upon those of all 

 other animals. For example, the smell from purulent carrion is cer- 

 tainly very disagreeable to us bipeds ; still it cannot prove so to the 

 dog for, in lieu of avoiding it, this quadruped never loses an oppor- 

 tunity of rolling in it. If the polecat has had the fetid gland " given 

 him by nature as a defence," then must nature have given a sweet 

 one to the civet for its destruction ; seeing that, whilst we shun the 

 first on account of its insupportable stench, we pursue and kill the 



* I use gland in the singular number, for the sake of brevity, but the animal 

 has two glands. 



