THE SQUIBBEL. 



men." According to tliis, the Kendo 'measures, from tail-stump 

 to nose-tip, two inches and five-eighths. 



Besides burrowing squirrds, and squirrels which live entirdy 

 in trees, there are squirrels which fly. To this family belongs 

 the Rocky-mountain squirrel, which, bat-like, lurks in the 

 gloom of the pine forests during the day, and rouses to activity 

 with the night. In an account of this species, Mr. Bermet 

 says : " They are principally distinguished from the common 

 squirrel by what is usually termed their flying membrane. 

 This apparatus consists of a folding of the skin along either 

 side, so as to form broad lalieral expansions, supported ante- 

 riorly and posteriorly by the limbs, between which they are 

 extended, and by peculiar bony processes, arising from the feet. 

 These expansions are not naked and membranous, like those of 

 the bats, but are actual continuations of the skin, clothed ex- 

 ternally by a dense fiir, simflar to tihat which invests every 

 other part of the body j n.«itfcer -do they serve, like the fl3ring 

 membranes of many of the bats, the purposes of wings, their 

 fonctions being limited to that of a parachute, giving to the 

 animal a considerable degree of buoyancy, and thus enabling 

 it to take leaps of almost incredible extent, and with the 

 velocity of an arrow." 



Hying squirrels are found in Ceylon. Sir Emerson Tennent 

 mentions two : one peculiar to Ceylon, and the other common 

 to Ceylon and India. He speaks of the former, which is the 

 larger, as being assisted in its prodigious leaps from tree to 

 tree by the parachute formed by the skin of the flanks, which, 

 on the extension of the hmbs, front and rear, is laterally ex- 

 panded from foot to foot. Thus, buoyed up in its descent, the 

 spring which it is enabled to make from one lofty tree to 

 another resembles the flight of a bird rather than the bound of 

 a quadruped. 



