MARSUPIALS AND MONOTREMES 339 
THE NATIVE CaTs 
The animals common in Tasmania and throughout the greater portion of the Australian 
Continent, and familiarly known as SPOTTED or NATIVE Carts, and to zoologists as DASYURES, 
enjoy also an unenviable reputation for their depredations among the settlers’ hen-roosts. To 
look at, these native cats are the most mild-mannered and inoffensive of creatures. Actually, 
however, they possess the most bloodthirsty proclivities, and may be aptly compared in their 
habits to the stoats, weasels, polecats, and other Old World carnivora. There are some five known 
species, the largest being equal to an ordinary cat in size, and the smaller ones about half 
these dimensions. All of them are distinguished by their spotted pattern of ornamentation, 
such spots being white or nearly so, and more or less abundantly sprinkled over a darker 
background which varies from light grey to chocolate-brown. In the commonest form, represented 
in the accompanying photograph, the ears and the under surface of the body are also often 
white. No two individuals, however, are to be found precisely alike in the pattern of their 
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By permission of S. Sinclair, Esq.) 
SPOTTED DASYURES, OR AUSTRALIAN NATIVE CATS 
This species is rather smaller than an ordinary-sized cat. All the dasyures are arboreal in their habits, and very destructive to birds 
[Sydney 
markings. The dasyures differ from the two preceding types, the Tasmanian wolf and the 
devil, in being essentially arboreal in their habits, living by day and breeding, as the majority 
of the Australian opossums, in the hollow gum-tree trunks, from which they emerge at nightfall 
to seek their food. This, in their native state, when hen-roosts are not accessible, consists 
mainly of birds and such smaller marsupial forms as they can readily overpower. 
THE POUCHED MICE 
The so-called POUCHED MICE represent a group of smaller-sized carnivorous mammals which 
have much in common with the dasyures, but are devoid of their spotted ornamentation. 
None of them exceed a rat in size. They number about twelve or fourteen known species, 
and are distributed throughout the greater part of Australia and New Guinea, and extend 
thence to the Aru Islands. They are said not to occur in the extreme north of the 
Australian Continent. The writer, however, obtained an example of the brush-tailed species, 
