One great order of mammals, is called the ungulata, or hoofed-order. The ungulates are animals well fitted for terrestrial life; they are vegetable-eaters, though now and then one of them, as the hog, may display some appetite for animal food, and sheep and cows will eat fish, especially if salted. No order is more familiar to us, as it contains all our best-known domestic animals, and those wild animals most popular in all menageries or zoological gardens, as the elephant, camel, and giraffe; and finally all those animals most ardently pursued by hunters, as the deer, antelope, and chamois. The order ungulata embraces two animals so widely different from the others, that they have been classified as sub-orders by themselves; one of these species is that of perhaps the largest land animal, the elephant; the other is nearly the smallest of all the ungulates, the hyrax, or cony. The hyrax is the cony mentioned in the Bible, and a verse of Scripture very well describes it: “The conies are a feeble folk, they have their dwellings in the rocks.” For a long time these little animals were a puzzle to zoologists, and finally Professor Huxley set them off in a sub-order all to themselves. Why were they so difficult to arrange? Let us see. [Illustration: THE THICK SKINS.] In the first place there are very few of them, and they are all found in Africa, near the Cape of Good Hope, except one species living in Syria. They are small creatures, rabbit-like, about eighteen inches long, covered with thick fur interspersed with bristles. First, they were classed with the rodents, because of their rabbit-like appearance. But their teeth turned out to be like those of a rhinoceros, and their skeletons like those of the hippopotamus family, and therefore they were placed among the ungulata. Soon there were other claims made upon them; their ribs and backbones were like those of that famous insect-eater, the sloth. These queer little beasts seemed to belong everywhere, and to fit nowhere, and they were set up by themselves. The conies are gregarious animals; they live in colonies. They have no means of offence or defence, and so they make their homes in holes in the rocks, and stealing out from their stony citadels, they eat grass, fruit, seeds, and roots. As they go forth to forage they leave a sentinel perched on a high rock, to watch for danger and give the alarm. In Africa the lions are their greatest enemies, and as soon as the warning of an approaching lion is given, the conies dash off swift as the wind, to hide in small crevices, where their foe cannot follow them.