NEW SPECIES OF PARADOXURUS. 



75 



untwisted, and carried sub-horizontally with the terminal part a little raised 

 so as to keep it off the ground. 



The females have 4 ventral teats, and produce, I understand, but one 

 brood per annum. The habits of the species render them more active by 

 night than by day — a circumstance clearly provided for by the largeness of 

 their eye with its extremely convex cornea. They sleep rolled up in a ball : 

 when angered, spit like cats ; and, like cats and dogs, drink by lapping 

 with the tongue. They are extremely ferocious and unruly when taken 

 mature ; but are apparently very capable of being tamed, if caught when 

 young, though the natives of the plains or hills never attempt to subject to 

 discipline their various and high natural endowments. Their cerebral 

 development is much greater than that of the Mangooses ; and they have a 

 finer sense of smell, but less acute hearing and diurnal vision. When fight- 

 ing they grapple with each other like wrestlers, scratching and biting at 

 the same time, but never quitting their hold on the body of the adversary. 

 They are matchless climbers ; and derive the extraordinary energy of their 

 double grasp with both hands and feet, whether in scansion or in contests 

 with each other and with their prey, from the high articulation and free 

 lateral motion of their limbs, the great strength and firm insertion in the 

 large humeri of their pectoral muscles, and from the sharpness and curva- 

 ture of their very mobile sheathed nails,^ — all points in which they differ 

 remarkably from the Mangooses, and approximate, through the Diluri, to 

 the Bears and Cats. Their rapid action is by digital bounds of the feet, — 

 palmary, of the hands : their walk slow, wholly plantigrade, and deliberate, 

 with the head and tail lowered and the back arched. Their intestines are 

 usually from 4 to 6 times the length of their bodies, -^ihs, of the canal con- 

 sisting of small gut, and the rest, of the large. They have a short csecum 

 of about an inch in length, and commonly of the same equable diameter 

 with the large intestine which, as well as the small, is thin, coated, and free 

 from valves, sacks, or any other apparatus calculated to retard the passage 



