66 



May 26, 1835. 

 N. A. Vigors, Esq., in the Chair. 



A letter was read, addressed to Mr. Vigors by Philip Poole, Esq., 

 Assistant Surgeon, Madras Medical Establishment, and dated Tra- 

 vancore Residency, December 17, 1834. It accompanied a collec- 

 tion of skins o{ Mammalia, Birds, and Reptiles, amounting in number 

 to upwards of a hundred, which the writer presented to the Society. 

 " The whole of the animals were obtained in the forests about twenty 

 miles inland from Kolun or Quilon, in the Travancore country." 

 Mr. Poole expresses his readiness to collect other objects for the 

 Society, and calls particular attention to the " red Mangouste, of 

 which," he says, " I send both male and female : they are considered 

 a great curiosity in India, and I have been told that they are only to 

 be found in the Travancore country." 



The several Mammalia contained in Mr. Poole's collection were 

 then exhibited, and Mr. Bennett brought them in succession under 

 the notice of the Meeting. The most interesting among them, he 

 stated, was the Ichneumon especially referred to by the donor, which 

 represented a species hitherto undescribed, and differing remarkably 

 from the usual livery of the genus. While the Herpestes fasciatus, 

 he observed, deviates from the nearly universal grizzled appearance 

 of the fur which characterizes the Ichneumons generally, and ap- 

 proaches, by the cross bands of its back and loins, to the markings 

 of the Suricate, Ryzcena tetradactyla, 111., the species from Travan- 

 core is equally aberrant by the possession of a longitudinal dark 

 dash on each side of the neck, which, in some degree, seems to ap- 

 proximate it in point of colouring, to the Civets, Civetta, Cuv. 



The almost uniform colouring of Mr. Poole's specimens, which are 

 destitute, except on the head, of any grizzled appearance, might 

 have been regarded as an additional deviation from the ordinary 

 characteristics of the group ; but this Mr. Bennett showed, by the 

 exhibition of a skin which had still more recently come into the So- 

 ciety's possession, is by no means universal throughout the indivi- 

 duals of the species, the skin last referred to (which is believed to 

 have been imported from Bombay) being grizzled, as in the other 

 Ichneumons, over the greater part of its surface, and having the uni- 

 form red colour limited to the extremity of the back and the con- 

 tiguous part of the tail. Notwithstanding this discrepancy in the 



