Volume 1

Cassell's popular natural history.

Date:
[1865-1866]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Cassell's popular natural history. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    793/824 (page 351)
    ' * • neighbouring archipelagos. They seem to fill, in the New World, to a certain extent, the same station as the civets do in the Old ; for no species of this latter family has yet been discovered in the Western Hemisphere. Like them, they secrete a strong odoriferous fluid ; pass the day in a state approaching to torpidity; prowl abroad during the night, and prey upon birds and the smaller quadrupeds, frequently making the poultry-yard the scene of their devastations, and sucking the blood of their victim before gorging themselves on its flesh. In the absence of more noble game, they make prey even of reptiles and insects; and fruits and other vegetable substances afford a common addition to their varied diet. But, unlike the civets, they live almost entirely upon the trees; the peculiar conformation of their hinder limbs, and the prehensile character of their naked tail, rendering them most admirable climbers. These tails are also of essential service in other circumstances; for the little ones, when frightened, leap upon their mother’s back, twist their tails around hers, and in this singular fashion escape, with her assistance, from the threatened danger. THE VIRGINIAN OPOSSUM* Tins animal is one of the largest species of the group, being, in size, fully equal to the domestic cat. The pouch beneath the bell}- of the adult females forms a pei’fect sac. The almost shapeless young, of TUB VIRGIN IAN Ol'OSSUH. scarcely move than a grain in weight, and generally about twelve in number, are found, at first, inse- parably attached to the teats within it; ns they increase in size, the teats become proportionately enlarged, and are prolonged into the stomachs of the young; and Rfter a certain number of days, having attained about the size of a mouse, and all their parts being completely formed, they abandon the teats, to which they thenceforward only return, like other sucking animals, to satisfy the cravings of their appetites, occasionally quitting the pouch itself, but still flying to it for shelter on the slightest alarm, and finally abandoning it at the end of about fifty days from the period when they were first deposited in it. The general colour of the Virginian opossum is a dull white, flic hair with which it is covered being of two different kinds. That which more immediately invests the body is a long, fine, woolly down, white at the base, with brownish tips, through which pass the still longer hairs of a pure white, * DUlclphis Virginuna.