100 THE TOWER MENAGERIE. 
expressed in terms the most vague and indistinct, neither 
excludes such animals as from their obvious affinities he 
could not refrain from referring to other groups, nor 
includes full one half of the species which he has 
arranged beneath it. The Ichneumon of the Nile, the 
Suricate of the Cape, the Coati of South America, the 
Stinking Weasels of the North, the Civet of Barbary, 
the Genette of the East, the Ratel of South Africa, and 
others equally distant in affinity, were sweepingly com- 
pelled into this ample receptacle, which was converted 
into a genuine “refuge for the houseless,’ in which 
every carnivorous quadruped, known, unknown, or im- 
perfectly known, that appeared to be without a place 
elsewhere, was charitably afforded a temporary asylum. 
In this arrangement, which brought animals truly 
digitigrade, with retractile claws, tongues covered with 
sharp papille, canine teeth of great power, and molars 
formed for tearing flesh, consequently in a high degree 
sanguinary and carnivorous in their habits, into close 
and intimate contact with others, which are positively 
plantigrade, with exserted claws, smooth tongues, and 
teeth of little power and evidently incapable of lacerating 
animal food, and which are therefore in all cases more 
or less, and in several instances wholly, vegetable eaters, 
it was impossible for naturalists long to coincide. The 
genus thus formed presented so heterogeneous a combi- 
nation, that the difficulty was rather where to stop in 
the dispersion of the dissimilar materials of which it was 
composed, than where to commence the necessary ope- 
ration; and in consequence nearly a dozen genera, not 
hanging together in one continued series, but scattered 
through various parts of the system, and most of them 
