HABITAT.--Sylhet, Burmah (Tenasserim).

DESCRIPTION.--Similar to _micrura_, but with a short tail covered
with white hairs, and it has one premolar less.

FAMILY SORECIDAE.

Small animals, which from their size, shape, and nocturnal habits
are frequently confounded with rats and mice, as in the case of the
common Indian Shrew, known to most of us as the Musk-rat; they have
distinct though small eyes, distinct ears, the conch of which is like
that of a mouse. The tail _thick_ and tapering, whence the generic
name _Pachyura_, applied by De Selys Longchamp, and followed
latterly by Blyth; but there is also a sub-family of bats to which
the term has been applied. "On each flank there is a band of stiff
closely-set bristles, from between which, during the rutting season,
exudes an odorous fluid, the product of a peculiar gland" (_Cuvier_);
the two middle superior incisors are hooked and dentated at the base,
the lower ones slanted and elongated; five small teeth follow the
larger incisors on the upper jaw, and two those on the lower. There
are three molars with sharp-pointed cusps in each jaw, with a small
tuberculous tooth in the upper. The feet are five-toed, separate,
not webbed like the moles; the snout is long and pointed and very
mobile.

This family has been subdivided in various genera by naturalists,
each one having his followers; and it is puzzling to know which to
adopt. Simplicity being the great point to aim at in all these matters,
I may broadly state that Shrews are divided into land and water shrews
(_Sorex_ and _Hydrosorex_); the former includes _Crocidura_ of
Wagner, _Corsira_ of Gray, and _Anurosorex_ of Milne-Edwards, the
latter _Crossopus_ and _Chimarrogale_, Gray.

For ages both in the West and East this poor little animal has been
the victim of ignorance. In England, even in the last century, it
was looked upon as an evil thing, as Gilbert White says: "It is
supposed that a shrew-mouse is of so baneful and deleterious a nature
that wherever it creeps over a beast, be it horse, cow, or sheep,
the suffering animal is afflicted with cruel anguish, and threatened
with loss of the use of the limb," the only remedy in such cases being
the application of the twigs of a shrew ash, which was an ash-tree
into which a large hole had been bored with an augur, into which a
poor little shrew was thrust alive and plugged up (_see_ Brand's
'Popular Antiquities' for a description of the ceremonies). It is
ple