Buffon's Natural History. Volume 07 (of 10): Containing a Theory of the Earth, a General History of Man, of the Brute Creation, and of Vegetables, Minerals, &c. &cBuffon, Georges Louis Leclerc, comte de
History
Buffon's Natural History. Volume 07 (of 10): Containing a Theory of the Earth, a General History of Man, of the Brute Creation, and of Vegetables, Minerals, &c. &c
Buffon, Georges Louis Leclerc, comte de
Natural history
underground, and only goes out towards the evening to seek for food; he
drinks often, lives upon fruit, roots, insects, and birds, when he can
catch them.
THE EIGHT BANDED.
This is not so large as the last, he has a small head, a sharp snout,
the ears erect, and rather long, the tail still longer, and the legs
rather short. He has small black eyes, four toes on the fore-feet, and
five on those behind; the head is covered with a helmet, the shoulders
and rump with shields, and the body with a cuirass composed of eight
moveable bands connected together, and with the bucklers, by nine
joints of a flexible skin; the tail has also a similar number of bands.
The colour of the cuirass on the back is iron grey, and on the flanks
and tail of a light grey with spots of iron grey. The belly is covered
with a whitish skin, grainy and hairy. The individual of this species,
described by Marcgrave, had a head three inches long, the ears near
two, the legs about three, the two middle toes of the fore-feet an
inch; the body from the neck to the origin of the tail seven inches,
and the tail nine inches in length; the bucklers had small white spots;
the moveable bands were marked by triangular figures; this crust was
not hard, being penetrable to the smallest shot which would kill the
animal, whose flesh is very white, and good to eat.
THE NINE BANDED.
Nieremberg has described this animal very imperfectly: Wormius and Grew
have described him much better. The individual which Wormius mentioned
was adult, and one of the largest of the species; that of Grew was
younger and smaller. We shall only give their descriptions as far as
they agree with our own specimens. Besides, it may be presumed, that
this nine-striped armadillo is not really a distinct species from
the eight, which he resembles in every other respect. We have two
eight-banded armadillos which are dried, and seem to be both males; we
have seven or eight with nine bands, one well preserved, which is a
female, and the others are so dried up that we could not discern the
sex. It is probable, therefore, that the eight-banded is the male and
the nine-banded the female. But this is merely a conjecture for we
shall give in the following article the description of two armadillos,
one of which has more rows than the other upon the buckler on the rump,
and yet they are so alike in every other respect, that one should be
inclined to think this difference arises only from that of the sex, for
it is not improbable, that greater numbers of these moveable bands may
be necessary to facilitate the gestation and delivery of the female.
The head of the armadillo, the skin of which Wormius has described,
was five inches from the end of the snout to the ears, and eighteen
inches from the ears to the tail, which last was a foot in length, and
composed of twelve rings. The head of that described by Grew was three
inches, the body seven and a half, and the tail eleven; the proportions
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