The Parti-coloured Bear—Æluropus Melanoleucus.

This is a rare and peculiar form of the family of Ursidæ about which I made a statement some years ago at the Zoological Society of London. It is a “stocky” animal with a small head and broad short muzzle, a feature to which it has no right according to its affinities. It is not a member of the high-class Felidæ whose special prerogative it is to wear their hair on a short broad muzzle in a downward direction as I showed in Chapter XI. Being a more bourgeois creature than a cat it has offended against such sumptuary laws as may exist in the animal kingdom.

Its hair ought to be worn in the proper backward or upward slope such as other bears, dogs and small carnivores display.

In my former note I modestly proposed an alternative sugges­tion to the one I now offer, of this aberrant and strange bit of hair-country, and this was that it was correlated with the broad short snout. As I have remarked before this word “correlated” is used so loosely as to mean almost anything the user likes, and it is, in my opinion, a fine source of confusion of thought. Undoubtedly this shape of the muzzle of the Parti-coloured Bear is linked somehow with the arrangement of its hair on that region. But it is hardly to be imagined that a direct reversal of hair from the proper bear-type, that is to say from the mouth to the head, would be produced by the mere broadening of the muzzle on account of some adapta­tion to its altering life. The link surely is of a different nature, and analogous to that of the corresponding surface in the lion and other cats, and that the cleaning of its fur on the snout is done in feline and not in ursine fashion, that is to say forwards, and that the breadth of muzzle is the reason for the change of method.