HABITS OF THE MUNGOOS 
eggs when it comes across them; and Diodorus Siculus remarks that there 
would have been no safety in sailing upon the Nile but for it. This belief 
was sufficient to cause the Middle Egyptians to protect the ichneumon until 
it became one of their sacred animals, and its cult arose at Heracleopolis, as 
is shown by wall paintings, mummies, etc. Anderson * thinks, however, 
that more probably the animal was cherished for its willingness to fight 
asps. Even now it is frequently tamed and kept in Egyptian houses to 
protect them from snakes, rats, and mice. The old term ichneumon is 
now little used, the whole group going by the native name, “‘mungoos,” of 
the more familiar Asiatic species. 
The East Indian mungoos is considerably smaller than the 
Egyptian one, is more rufous in hue, and has no black mark- 
ings; it occurs throughout peninsular India and 
Ceylon, but not east of the Bay of Bengal. It inhab- 
its thickets, broken, bushy ground, and village fields rather 
than dense forests, and makes its home in holes among rocks 
or in the earth. Its multiplication is rapid. Snakes and 
lizards, small birds and rodents, are the items oftenest on its 
bill of fare, and it is an arrant poultry thief. “I have often 
seen it,’ Jerdon writes, ‘“make a dash into a veranda where 
some cages of mynas, parrakects, etc., were daily placed, and 
endeavor to tear the birds from their cages.” In spite of this 
weasel-like fierceness, it is easily tamed, not only as a useful 
mouser (for which thousands are kept in the East) but because 
it makes a gentle and affectionate pet, often seen in the company 
of wandering Hindoo snake charmers and showmen. These 
virtues led to the introduction of the mungoos into Jamaica 
in 1872, to destroy the rats which beset the plantations of 
sugar cane and seemed unconquerable. The surprising results 
of the experiment have been related in a book by D. Morris,’” 
and in many newspaper articles. The general effect I have 
summed up elsewhere as follows: — 
Mungoos. 
“At first they were highly beneficial, reducing the stated annual loss 
from rats from $500,000 to one half that, but in less than twenty years the 
island was almost overrun with them. Not only did they kill rats and mice, 
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