He has no tail, and gives at first sight the idea of a rat, rather than of any other creature. His colour is a grey mixt with a reddish brown, perfectly like the wild or warren rabbit. His belly is white, from the point of the lower jaw, to where his tail would begin, if that he had one. All over his body he has scattered hairs, strong and polished like his mustachoes, these are for the most part two inches and a quarter in length. His ears are round, not pointed. He makes no noise that ever I heard, but certainly chews the cud. To discover this, was the principal reason of my keeping him alive; those with whom he is acquainted he follows with great assiduity. The arrival of any living creature, even of a bird, makes him seek for a hiding-place, and I shut him up in a cage with a small chicken, after omitting feeding him a whole day; the next morning the chicken was unhurt, tho’ the Ashkoko came to me with great signs of having suffered with hunger. I likewise made a second experiment, by inclosing two smaller birds with him, for the space of several weeks; neither were these hurt, though both of them fed, without impediment, of the meat that was thrown into his cage, and the smallest of these a kind of tit-mouse, seemed to be advancing in a sort of familiarity with him, though I never saw it venture to perch upon him, yet it would eat frequently, and at the same time, of the food upon which the Ashkoko was feeding; and in this consisted chiefly the familiarity I speak of, for the Ashkoko himself never shewed any alteration of behaviour upon the presence of the bird, but treated it with a kind of absolute indifference. The cage, indeed, was large, and the birds having a perch to sit upon in the upper part of it, they did not annoy one another. In Amhara this animal is called Ashkoko, which I apprehend is derived from the singularity of those long herinacious hairs, which, like small thorns, grow about his back, and which in Amhara are called Ashok. In Arabia and Syria he is called Israel’s Sheep, or Gannim Israel, for what reason I know not, unless it is chiefly from his frequenting the rocks of Horeb and Sinai, where the children of Israel made their forty years peregrination; perhaps this name obtains only among the Arabians. I apprehend he is known by that of Saphan in the Hebrew, and is the animal erroneously called by our translators Cuniculus, the rabbit or coney.