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THE STORY OF THE CIVET . 
is very destructive, killing any birds or small animals it can capture, and 
often attacking fowls, ducks, etc., but also feeding on snakes, frogs, insects, 
eggs, and on fruits and some roots. Civets take readily to water. 
The palm-civets are only abroad at night and live almost entirely in trees. 
Their food is in part animal and part vegetable substances. 
Of the various families of true palm-civets, five are found in India and 
Burma. In eight of these the tail is considerably more than half the length 
of the head and body; and in seven of these it is uniformly-colored. The 
Celebes palm-civet, forming the eighth of this series, is, however, distin¬ 
guished by having its tail banded with indistinct rings of darker and lighter 
brown. The imperfectly-known woolly palm-civet of Thibet differs from 
AN AFRICAN AND AN INDIAN CIVET. 
all the rest in the woolly nature of its fur, and also by the length of the tail 
not exceeding that of the head and body. 
The best known of all is the Indian palm-civet, found throughout the 
greater part of India and Ceylon. The general color of the coarse and some¬ 
what ragged fur is a blackish or brownish-gray, without any stripes across 
the back in fully adult individuals. The length of the head and body of a 
male measured by me was twenty-two and one-half inches, and that of the 
tail nineteen and one-half inches; the corresponding dimensions of a female 
bei ng in one instance twenty and seventeen and one-half inches, while in a 
second both were about eighteen inches. 
This species lives much on trees, especially on the cocoanut palms, and 
