His look was sly and wily. Bruce adds that the Fennec builds his nest on trees, and does not burrow in the earth. , Illiger, in his generic description of Megalotis, states the number of molar teeth on each side of the upper jaw to be six, but gives no account of those in the lower ; nor does it appear on what authority he describes the teeth at all, or where he inspected his type. In other respects, his descrip, tion agrees pretty closely with that given by Bruce. Sparman* took the Fennec to be of the species he has called Zerda, a little animal found in the sands of Cambeda, near the Cape of Good Hope ; and Pennant and Gmelin have called Bruce’s animal, after Sparman, Cams cerdo ; Brander considered it as a species of fox ; Blumenbach rather as belonging to the Viverræ. Illiger quotes Lacépède as having made a distinct genus of it, Fennecusi, and has himself placed it as one, under the name of Megalotis, in the order Falculata, in the same family with, and immediately preceding the genera Canis and Hyena. M. Geoffroy Saint Hilaire, assuming Bruce’s account to be imperfect and inaccurate, supposes that the Fennec is neither more nor less than a Galago ; but M. Desmarest differs from him in opinion, and places it in a situation analogous to that assigned it by Illiger, at the end of the Digitigrades, in the order Carnassiers. Cuvier merely takes the following short .notice of this animal in a note, “ Le Fennec de Bruce que Gmelin a nommé Canis cerdo, et Illiger Megalotis, est trop peu connu pour pouvoir être classé. C est un petit animal d’Afrique, dont les oreilles égalent presque le corps en grandeur, et qui grimpe aux arbres, mais on n’en a descrit ni les dents ni les doigts.” (Reg. Anim. I. 151. note). This eminent zoologist appears from the above to hold our countryman’s veracity, or at least his accuracy of observation, and fidelity of description, in the same low estimation as M. Geoffroy Saint Hilaire ; or he would hardly have talked of the ears of the Fennec being nearly as large as its body!, or have asserted that * Voyage, ii. 20. t Desmarest states, (Ency. Meth. note), that he cannot find any work of Lacépède in which the genus Fennecus is proposed. + Perhaps M. Cuvier was led into this mistake by an error of the pen or press, in M. Desmarest s translation of Brüce 8 description of the animal. Bruce says, (< from the snout to the neither the teeth nor toes have been described. But the illustrious foreigners of whom we have, in no offensive tone we hope, just spoken, are not the only persons who have hesitated to place implicit confidence in all that Bruce has given to the world: his own countrymen have shown at least ail equal disposition to set him down as a dealer in the marvellous. Time, however, and better experience, are gradually doing the Abyssinian traveller that justice which his cotemporaries were but too ready to deny him. M. Desmarest considers all the characters which Bruce has given of the Fennec as correct, “ not conceiving it possible, that he could have assumed the far too severe tone he adopted in speaking of Sparman and Brander, if he had not been perfectly sure of his facts.” Mr. Griffith has given the figures of two animals, both, as he conceives, belonging to this genus ; one of them came from the Cape of Good Hope, and is now in the Museum at Paris; it is named by Cuvier Canis megalotis, and is described by Desmarest in his Mammalogie, (Ency. Meth. Supp. p. 538) : Major Smith has called it Megalotis Lalandii, to distinguish it from Bruce’s Fennec. The other animal is from the interior of Nubia, and is preserved in the Museum at Frankfort. Both the figures are from the accurate and spirited pencil of Major Hamilton Smith. The first animal is as large as the common fox, and decidedly different from Bruce’s Fennec; the second, Major Smith considers to be Bruce’s animal. In the fifth volume of the Bulletin des Sciences, sect. 2. p. 262., is an extract from a memoir of M. Leuckart, (Isis, 2 Cahier, 1825), on the Canis cerdo, or Zerda of naturalists, in which it is stated that M. M. Temminck and Leuckart saw the animal in the Frankfort Museum, which had been previously drawn by Major Smith, and recognized it for the true Zerda; and the former gentleman, in the prospectus of his Monographies de Mammalogie, announced it as belonging to the genus Canis, and not to that of' Galago. M. Leuckart coincides in opinion with M. Temminck, and conceives that the genus Megalotis, or Fennecus, must be suppressed, “ the animal very obviously belonging to the genus Canis, and even to the subanus, he was about ten inches lo n g t h e translation, “ Ce Fennec avoit six pouces de longueur, depuis le bout du nez jusqu’ a l ’origine de la queue.” The same mistake occurs* in M. Geoffroy Saint Hilaire’s quotation of Bruce; but this cannot be a misprint, for the length is not expressed by the word sir, but by the Arabic cypher 6. bb2
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