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.