AGOUTIS AND PACAS 
rapid springs which succeed one another so quickly as to give the appearance 
of a gallop. ‘Cutias,’ as these animals are called on the Amazons, can 
swim well, but are unable to dive. Their food consists of the foliage and 
roots of ferns and other plants, as well as fallen fruits; their sharp incisor 
teeth enabling them to perforate the shells of the hardest nuts. In culti- 
vated districts they do much harm to plantations of sugar cane and plan- 
tains. Of their reproduction in a wild state, comparatively little is known. 
They breed, however, at least twice in the year.... If captured at a suffi- 
ciently early age, agoutis can be 
readily tamed; and it is not 
uncommon in South American 
houses to find one or more 
of these animals roaming at * 
large... . They are much 
hunted by the natives for the 
sake of their flesh.” Thus far, 
Lydekker.!° Turning ‘to Rod- 
way,®® we find him much pleased 
at the wily ways of this small 
strategist of the woods. ‘‘If chased,” he tells us, ‘‘he will run along the 
shallows of a creek to hide his scent from the dogs, or swim over and 
back again several times for the same purpose. He never runs straight 
when pursued, but doubles, often hiding until a dog has passed, and 
then making off in a different direction. Like the fox, he has been 
hunted for a very long period; and, like Reynard, has grown wiser 
with every generation.” A smaller species, the aguchi, inhabits Central 
America and some of the West India Islands. 
One of the most prominent of the smaller Brazilian mammals, 
particularly in view of the fact that its flesh is excellent eating 
in a country where wild meat is scarce, is the paca, 
a cousin of the agoutis and connecting their family 
with that of the cavies, presently to be introduced. Wallace 
and others declare its meat is the ‘‘very best the country pro- 
duces, being fat, delicate, and very tender,” whereas agouti flesh 
is dry and tasteless. The habits of the pacas — there is a 
second smaller species in the uplands of Ecuador — are very 
like those of the agouti, that is, they are nocturnal and bur- 
419 
Pacas. 
