136 The Hy rax of Syria. 



Bay hyrax, which "has two upper and four lower front rodent- 

 like teeth ; its feet are tetradactylous, like those of the Cape 

 hyrax, and it has rounded claws on all the toes." I think this 

 hyrax was known to no one else. The Abyssinian hyrax de- 

 scribed by Bruce, and that found in Syria and Arabia, are pro- 

 bably identical, H. Syriacus. In the latter countries, he tells 

 us it <c is called Israel's sheep, or Gaunim Israel, from its fre- 

 quenting the rocks of Horeb and Sinai, where the children of 

 Israel made their forty years' peregrination." 



There is a singular error in Griffith's Cuvier, vol. v. He 

 says that the H. Syriacus differs from the South African species 

 principally " in having only three toes on the anterior feet," and 

 (which is correct) " long bristles or hairs dispersed over the 

 upper part of the body." Again, in his description of the 

 genus Hyrax, he gives " toes before, four or three ; behind four," 

 and, where he is as certainly wrong, " eyes small." 



The specimen from which the accompanying drawing of 

 the skeleton is taken was sent from Mar Saba, a deep rocky 

 ravine in the wilderness of Juda3a ; it is that of a young adult 

 male. The skin has been sacrificed that the skeleton might be 

 perfect. The spinal column, it will be seen, is very close set ; 

 it contains seven cervical, twenty dorsal, eight lumbar verte- 

 bras, add to these five sacral and six coccygeal. In the Cape 

 hyrax Mr. Martin found seven cervical, twenty dorsal, and nine 

 lumbar. Professor Owen also, when writing of the same spe- 

 cies, gives twenty-nine as the dorso-lumbar vertebras. Mr. 

 Martin counts in Gapensis the sacral and coccygeal as fourteen. 

 In the H. Syriacus I can only make eleven. He gives for H. 

 Gapensis seven true and fourteen false ribs. In H. Syriacus 

 there are seven true and thirteen false. These differences 

 are curious in animals so nearly allied as the two species must 

 be. The number of ribs on a side, twenty, is only exceeded 

 in one mammal, the Brady pus didactylus, or two-toed sloth, 

 which has twenty-two; no other quadruped approaches it; 

 while its congeners the rhinoceros and tapir, have respectively 

 sixteen and eighteen.* 



The most marked peculiarity of the skull is the size and 

 strength of* the lower jaw, which is unusually massive, nothing 

 we know of in the economy of the animal seeming to require a jaw 

 so powerful ; there is, in proportion, a greater depth and strength 



* Professor Owen in liis paper on 'the "Anatomy of the Auroch " writes : — 

 "The constancy in tlio Dumber of the true vertebra? in the Artiodactj/le Ungulates 

 is the more remarkable and demonstrative of tlieir natural co-aflinity, bj contrast 

 with tbe variable number of those vertebra; in the nilil-toed, or Prrteodactyle group, 

 in which we find twenty-two dorso-lumbar vertebra: in the rhinoceros, twenty - 

 three in the tapir or pala:otherium, and as many as twenty-nine in the little 

 hyrax." 



