THE LIFE OF MAMMALS 
an Egyptian beauty, to enhance the size and brilliancy of the orbs. 
His bright, pretty little face is capable of assuming the greatest variety of 
expressions, that which it most frequently wears when in repose being a 
contented, self-satisfied smirk, impudence and independence displaying 
themselves at every line of his plump little figure. He is absolutely 
without fear, and with consummate coolness and audacity will waik up to 
the largest and most forbidding-looking dog, although a perfect stranger 
to him, and, carefully investigating the stranger on all sides with great 
curiosity, express disgust and defiance in a succession of little short, sharp, 
barks.” ¥”? 
There lives in the unforested parts of Africa a strange and 
rather rare animal called aard-wolf (i.e. ‘earth wolf”) by the 
Boers, and deeb among the Arabs of Upper Egypt, which 
somewhat resembles a large, thin-bodied, striped 
hyena, but has longer ears and a more pointed muz- 
zle. The tail is long and bushy, the reddish, black-striped coat 
is coarse and long, and rises in anger along the ridge of the neck 
and back into a bristling crest. It has five toes in front and 
four behind, and its skull and teeth are somewhat like those 
of a mungoos, the latter being small and weak and only thirty 
or thirty-two in number. Consequently, although it dwells 
in pairs in burrows of its own digging, and wanders abroad 
at night in search of carrion like a hyena, it cannot manage 
tough food, and subsists largely by digging termites out of 
their hills. Schulz,’ who calls this animal ‘‘ant bear,” says 
that the natives of the dry deserts between the Zambesi and 
Chobe rivers go down its hole, one man holding to the legs of 
another, and a third at the mouth of the hole holding the lat- 
ter’s feet, to get wet earth from which to squeeze moisture and 
so save themselves from famishing of thirst. 
Aard-wolf. 
This aard-wolf, for which some naturalists make a separate family (Pro- 
telida), stands intermediate between the mungooses and the hyenas, and 
seems to reproduce pretty closely a bone-breaking animal well known as a 
fossil in the early Pliocene rocks of central Europe and Asia, named Icti- 
therium, in which the characters of the Viverride and the Hyznide are 
so blended that they cannot be separated. After him, however, we find a 
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