. . CAN. I Sora-panji-g,adur, . TEL. Dadde-weddeo, . SINGH. I Clalat-yelka. of WADDAR.
The Golundi, one of the Muricla3, is found in Southern India and Ceylon. The tail is naked and scal3r, somewhat villose. Tho c,olour is an olive -brown above. it lives entirely in tho jungle, choosing its habitation in a thick bush, among the thorny branches of which, or on the ground, it constructs a nest of elastic stalks and fibres of dry grass, thickly interwoven. The nest is of a round or oblong shape, from 6 to 9 inches in diameter, within which is a chamber about 3 or 4 inches in diameter, in which it rolls itself up. Around and through the bush are sometimes observed small beaten pathways, along which the little animal seems habitually to pa.ss. Its motion is somewhat slow, and it does not appear to have the same power of leaping or springing, by which the rats in general avoid danger. Its food seems to be vegetable, the only contents of the stomach that were observed being tho roots of the hurriali grass, Cynodon dactylon. Its habits are solitary (except when the female is bringing up her young) and diurnal, feeding during the mornings and evenings. In Ceylon it ocasionally commits much damage, seem ingly to get the bark, for they do not appear to eat the coffee berries. With their long sbarp
incisors they bite off with great smoothness tho smaller and younger branches, generally au inch from the stern ; and should the plants be quite young, just taken from the nursery, they bite them right off a few inches from the ground, and carry them to their nests. Their food in the jungles is a species of Strobilanthus, called Nilu or Nilloo in Singhalese, and the rats only issue from their forest residence and attack the coffee estatea when their forest food fails. They invade the coffee plantations in swarins, gnaw off the young branches, and divest the trees of bitch; and bloom. So many as a thousand have been killed in one day on a single estate. Like the lemming of Norway and Lapland, they migrate in vast numbers on the occurrence of a scarcity of their ordinary food. The Malabar coolies are so fond of their flesh, that they evince a preference for those districts in which the coffee plantations are subject to their incursions, where they fry tho rats in cocoanut oil, or convert them into curry.— Nietner ; Tennant's Ceylon; Elliot.