THE FLYING-SQUIRRELS OF ASIA AND 
AFRICA 
Despite the repetition of the statement as to their essential 
structural difference in almost every work on popular natural 
history issued to the public, few persons, save those who 
have made anatomy a special study, can be induced to 
believe that swallows and swifts are not closely allied 
birds. And it may be presumed that an equal degree of 
incredulity will prevail in the minds of most people when 
they are told that the two animals whose portraits are 
given in the plates accompanying have no sort of intimate 
relationship, being in fact much more widely sundered from 
one another than are such apparently dissimilar creatures 
as a squirrel and a beaver. An instance of this incredulity 
has indeed been actually published with regard to the 
figured species of the so-called African flying-squirrels, or, 
as they might be better termed, scale-tailed squirrels. Now 
this particular species of the group was sent home from 
Central Africa by Emin Pasha in the ’eighties, and described 
and figured under the name of Anomalurus pusillus by Mr. 
Thomas, of the British Museum, in 1887 and 1888. Three 
years later the figure (the one here reproduced) appeared 
in Major Casati’s “Ten Years in Equatoria,” with the 
following remarks :— 
“The flying squirrel (7boma) lives in the forests, almost 
always upon the branches of the trees, whence it throws 
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