The Rasse is a much smaller animal than the two preceding species, its head and body together being about twenty-two or twenty-three inches long, and its tail sixteen or seventeen. It is of a yellowish or brownish-grey colour, with longitudinal bands on the back, and regular rows of spots on the side. The tail has eight or nine complete dark rings.
In India it is kept tame, the natives often domesticating it for the purpose of more conveniently extracting the civet.
THE GENETTE.[79]
This is the only Viverrine animal common in Europe, in some parts of which it is a regularly domesticated animal, and catches Mice as well as a Cat. Besides living in all the southern parts of Europe, it is found in the whole of Africa north of the Sahara, that wonderful desert which constitutes a boundary as efficient in preventing the dispersal of animals as an ocean. In this, as in many other cases, the North African animals are identical, or agree closely with those of Europe, while those of trans-Saharal Africa are of an entirely different character.
The fur of the Genette is of a grey colour, “spotted with small black or brown patches, which are sometimes round and sometimes oblong. The tail, which is as long as the body (about twenty-one inches), is ringed with black and white, the black rings being to the number of nine or eleven. There are white spots on the eyebrows, the cheeks, and the end of the nose.”
The civet-pouches are, in this genus, reduced to very slight depressions at the sides of the root of the tail, and although the odour of the animal is tolerably strong—yet not disagreeably so, as in the Civet—there is no perceptible secretion from these pouches.
THE MUNGOOS, OR ICHNEUMON.[80]
The Ichneumons, or Mungooses, form a well-defined genus of Weasel-like animals, with semi-plantigrade feet, five toes provided with somewhat retractile claws, and long tails. The species now under consideration is found in Southern India as well as “in the North-west Provinces and the Punjab, and throughout the Deccan up to the Nerbudda River. It frequents alike the open country and low jungles, being found in dense hedgerows, thickets, holes in banks, &c., and it is very destructive to such birds as frequent the ground,” for it only sucks the blood, and so kills many birds before it is satisfied.
It is sixteen or seventeen inches long, its tail fourteen, and is of a tawny yellowish-grey colour. The head is marked with reddish and yellowish rings, so arranged as to produce a resultant iron-grey hue.