16 
ZOOLOGICAL GARDENS. 
Capensis, and Sparrman with their Viverra mellivora. 
These were very properly united by Pennant, who 
nevertheless appears to have had no personal know- 
ledge of the Cape animal, for happening to meet with 
a living specimen from India in the possession of John 
Hunter, he treated it as entirely new and nondescript, 
and, totally unsuspicious of the existence of the slightest 
relation between it and the African quadruped, placed 
it in a distant part of the system and in a genus with 
which it has but little real affinity, under the name 
of the Indian Badger. This latter was adopted by 
Dr. Shaw in his General Zoology as the Ursus Indicus ; 
but not without an indication of the intimate connexion 
subsisting between the three assumed species, which it 
was here tardily acknowledged might perhaps prove to 
be identical. That such is really the fact will, we 
think, be sufficiently obvious from the description of 
our specimens, compared with the accounts of former 
writers. 
In size the Ratel is about equal to the Badger, to 
which it also bears a distant resemblance in form. The 
whole of the upper surface of its body, which is singu- 
larly broad and flat, comprehending the top of the head 
and neck, the entire plane of the back, and the root of 
the tail, is of a dull ash-gray, whiter towards the head, 
and strongly contrasting with the under parts, including 
also the muzzle, the contour of the eyes and of the ears, 
the limbs, and the remainder of the tail, which are 
throughout perfectly black. The only visible difference 
which we have been able to detect between the Asiatic 
and African animals consists in this, that the latter is 
described as possessing a stripe of lighter gray, about 
an inch in breadth, j^assing from behind the ears along 
each side, and forming the boundary of the two colours, 
which is entirely wanting in our specimen, and in the 
