TREE-SHREWS AND TENRECS 
naked hind legs, which give them much the look and the leaping gait of 
jerboas. Many kinds are known, all as big as rats, or larger, and dwelling 
in crevices of rocks and like places, whence they go abroad at . 
nightfall in search of insects. gence! 
Much like them in structure and in the flexible trunk are 
the pretty tupaias or tree-shrews of India and eastward to the Philippines; 
otherwise they so closely resemble squirrels in appearance, food, and but 
manners that in the case of one species at least ‘‘one has to look at 
the teeth” to distinguish them. This has often been adduced as a case 
of “‘mimicry,” which is very rare among mammals; but it seems to me 
rather an instance of ‘‘convergence,” that is, the result of two animals 
coming to be like one another because they have followed the same manner 
of life under identical circum- 
stances. The likeness of the 
jumping shrews to jerboas is an- 
other instance. Some of these 
tupaias are very numerous and 
familiar in India and Sumatra, 
running freely about houses when 
allowed, and even scampering 
over the table to pick morsels of 
food from the plates. 
A rarer oddity is the river 
shrew of West Africa, which looks and behaves like a small otter, though 
its tail is compressed like a muskrat’s. Then there are the almiquis of 
Cuba and Haiti, which suggest ground-traveling opossums, and their 
cousins, the ancient race of tenrecs of Madagascar. Among many curious 
peculiarities, the tenrecs have that of spines along the back or mixed with 
the hairs, and an ability to partly roll themselves up.** These qualities 
show a likeness to the hedgehogs, which are widely distributed in the Old 
World but unknown in the New, for our ‘‘hedgehog” is a porcupine. 
ELEPHANT SHREW. 
The common European hedgehog is a queer little animal, 
about ten inches long, covered with an armor of short, stiff, 
and sharp gray spines, and trotting on small legs 
and feet which scarcely lift it off the ground. It 
pokes its piglike snout into all sorts of places likely to harbor 
prey, and is careless of enemies, since it is guarded as well as 
is an armadillo or tortoise in its shell. Thus protected and 
75 
Hedgehog. 
