GENETS, LINSANGS, AND PALM CIVETS 
A Madagascan species, the fossane, closely resembles it externally, but 
has no scent pouch. 
The genets are similar animals, but like weasels in their 
slenderness and activity, prettily marked, and producing hardly 
any musk. They inhabit Africa, with one species along the 
north shore of the Mediterranean and in Asia Minor. When a 
genet is stealing cautiously through the grass it looks more like 
a snake than a mammal. 
Handsomest of the family are the East-Indian linsangs, 
for they are graceful and wear a velvety fur of reddish fawn 
color, marked with lines of large black blotches, ences aan 
becoming rings on the tail. They seek their food, Linsangs. 
mainly birds, both on the ground and in trees, and make their 
homes in hollows of trees, where two litters a year are produced. 
There is a West- 
African species 
(Poiana), whose be- 
havior is more like 
that of a genet. 
West Africa also 
possesses a single 
isolated form (Nan- 
dinia) of another 
large and more familiar Asiatic group known as palm civets, or 
“tree cats,’? because they spend their lives mainly in the palms 
and mangoes, where they sleep by day and prowl by night, 
often several in company. There are about a dozen species, 
ranging from Ceylon around to China and Formosa, and along 
the Malay Archipelago to the Philippines; all have a grayish 
or brownish fur, with the usual dark markings. The only one 
at all well known is the Indian ‘‘toddy cat,’’ so called because 
of its fondness for drinking the sweet, intoxicating juice of the 
toddy palm, from the buckets in which the people of southern 
India collect this sap from the tapped trees, This pretty ani- 
153 
A PARADOXURE. 
