ORDER CARNASSIER. 419 



under the name of the Golden Paradoxurus, (Paradoccurus 

 aureus). It is a very young specimen. 



Doctor Horsfield, also, gives us a description and figure 

 of a rare Javanese animal, the Delundung, which appears 

 to hold, analogous to some others, an intermediate station 

 between two genera or sub-genera of our author, Felis and 

 Viverra. He, at first, placed it among the Felinae, under 

 the name of Felis Gracilis, but he was afterwards confirmed 

 in his original intention of making it a distinct genus, 

 under the name of Prionodon. The French naturalists, 

 knowing no more of the animal, apparently, than is to be 

 obtained from the description of Doctor Horsfield, and the 

 short, previous, and doubtful allusion of General Hard- 

 wick, have placed it, unhesitatingly, among the Viverrae, 

 and, accordingly, we find it in M. Desmarest's catalogue, 

 forming a species of Civet. 



Intermediate genera we have had frequent opportunities 

 of noticing, and shall have frequent occasion to mention 

 others, and they may be the more deserving of particular 

 attention by the Zoologist, as affording matters of fact, 

 from which important results may be elicited. The invio- 

 lability of genera, on the one hand, and their gradual 

 gradations on the other, are facts from which no very de- 

 terminate conclusions have hitherto been drawn. Certain 

 it is, that some one or more species of most genera exhibit 

 a declination, as it were, to other very different animals, 

 and when such facts are placed in conjunction with what we 

 know of the tendency to varieties, from location, or what- 

 ever other cause arising, the greater becomes the natural 

 curiosity to ascertain the probable number of primary or- 

 ganic creations, and the consequent number of those spring- 

 ing from secondary causes : while, therefore, the utmost 

 caution should be exercised, on the one hand, not to de- 

 stroy the utility of zoological science by an undue multi- 



