occasionally, being able to continue under water for a considerable time. When going to sleep, they roll themselves up like a ball, and are not easily awakened. Their voice is very soft, resembling a murmur; but they are said not to exert it unless irritated.

Both varieties of the ichneumon, but especially the Egyptian, are deadly enemies to serpents, rats, and other noxious animals; and the Indian variety attacks with great eagerness that formidable reptile the cobra-dicapello. Hence, being easily tamed, the ichneumon is kept as a domesticated animal, both in Egypt and India. Possessing the strength and agility of the cat, with a greater propensity to carnage, it will glide along the ground like a serpent, dart with the velocity of an arrow, and seize its object with infallible certainty, griping the most venomous pents by the throat in such a manner as to secure itself from injury. It sits up like a

ser

squirrel, lifting its food to its mouth with its fore-feet, and catching any thing that is thrown to it. Being fond of poultry, it will sometimes feign itself dead till they come within its reach. But the most remarkable of its instincts, and the most serviceable to man, is that which impels it to seek and dig out of the sand the eggs of the crocodile, which it destroys, and to intercept and kill the young of that formidable animal as soon as they have left the shell, and before they have been able to reach the water. We are assured that, as the jaws of the ichneumon do not open wide enough for him to grasp the crocodile's eggs between them, he endeavours to break them by throwing them up and letting them fall, or by rolling them backward and forward on the ground. If he finds a stone, he will place himself with his back towards it, stride with his hind legs, and, holding the egg in his fore-paws, throw it under his belly against

the stone, and repeat this operation till he has broken the shell. Ancient writers have even gone so far as to assert that, when the ichneumon finds a crocodile asleep on the shore, he will boldly enter the mouth of the enormous animal, kill his enemy by devouring his entrails, and then eat his way out of the belly of the monster. It is scarcely necessary to contradict so palpable a fable.

THE CIVET.

THIS is the largest species of the weasel kind, measuring about two feet from nose to tail, and the tail about fourteen inches. The ground colour of the body is a yellowish gray, marked with large dusky spots, disposed in rows on each side, and sometimes intermixed with a rusty tinge. The hair, which stands up along the top of the back like a sort of

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mane, is coarse; the ears are short and rounded; the eyes blue; the tip of the nose, sides. of the face, lips, chin, breast, and feet black; the rest of the face and part of the sides of the neck yellowish white, with three black stripes running from each ear to the throat and shoulders. The tail is generally black, but sometimes marked with pale spots near the base.

The civet is a native of several parts of Africa and India. It feeds chiefly on small quadrupeds and birds, which it takes by surprise; like the cat, sometimes committing depredations among poultry, when it can steal into a farm-yard. But, though naturally wild and somewhat ferocious, it is capable of being tamed and rendered tolerably familiar. It is said to be extremely voracious, and will sometimes roll itself for a minute or two on meat that is given to it before it eats it.

This animal is remarkable for the produc

tion of a drug called civet, which is sometimes erroneously confounded with musk. It is a secretion formed in a small pouch under the tail, which the animal empties spontaneously. The Dutch keep many of them alive at Amsterdam for the purpose of obtaining this drug. Putting the creature into a wooden cage so narrow that it cannot turn round, they empty the pouch by means of a small spoon, or spatula, twice or thrice a week. The civet thus procured, being unadulterated, is held in higher estimation than that from India and the Levant. It is so powerful as to be almost insupportable, when a person is shut up in the same room with the animal: but the smell of a small quantity is more agreeable than musk, to which it bears some resemblance.