Fur-bearing animals : a monograph of North American Mustelidae, in which an account of the wolverene, the martens or sables, the ermine, the mink and various other kinds of weasels, several species of skunks, the badger, the land and sea otters, and numerous exotic allies of these animals, is contributed to the history of North American mammals / by Elliott Coues.

Elliott Coues

Date:: 1877

Credit: Fur-bearing animals : a monograph of North American Mustelidae, in which an account of the wolverene, the martens or sables, the ermine, the mink and various other kinds of weasels, several species of skunks, the badger, the land and sea otters, and numerous exotic allies of these animals, is contributed to the history of North American mammals / by Elliott Coues. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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Norz [Putorius lutreola],—This animal is at once proclaimed to be East European by its name; for the word, first used in Germany by the Saxon mineralogist Agricola, in 1546, is Scla- vonic; the Eussian is norka, the South Eussian nortscMk, the Polish nurek, from the verb nurka^ to dive. The Swedes alone, in whose country the animal also appears, have a particular name for it, mdnk, which is the source of the mink or minx ap- plied to the different North American species [P. vison]. Otter [Lutra vulgaris].—To the comparative philologist this word offers a field as broad as it is difficult, for the names of the animal in various European languages are enough alike to be compared, yet sufficiently dissimilar to be questioned as the same word; the initial particularly differs in a suspicious manner: otter, lutra, evodpiq. In Sanskrit and Zend,* we find for an aquatic animal, of what kind is not known with cer- tainty, but which may easily have been the Fish-otter, the name udra-s, derived from the root ud, water (Latin udus, Greek odcDp). With this agrees perfectly the Lithuanian udra, the Ourlandic and Livonian uderis, and, with slight change of the initial, wydra, which obtains throughout the Sclavonic tongues, the Eoumanian vidre—all of which are actual names of the Otter. In the Germanic languages, the u becomes o; otr in the old Northern sagas, ottar in old mediaeval German, otter in the present German, Dutch, Danish, and Swedish, though in the latter the early initial u sometimes reappears, giving utter. The change of d into t is the rule in the rendering of the sound of Sanskrit, Greek, Lithuanian, and Sclavonic in the Germanic languages, although in pure German this consonant properly changes into sharp s (odwp, water—^^wasser^^), as is not, how- ever, the case with the name of the animal. In Greek, we find, as the name of the Otter, kvoSpiq, Herod. 2, 72, and 4, 109, hudp'tc;, Arist. Hist. An. 1,1, and 8, 5, or evudpoq, Aelian Hist. An. 11, 37, nearly always mentioned in connection with the Beaver; also the forms, agreeing better with the San- skrit, udpoq, udpa, the former for an actual serpent (Ilias, 2, 723, Arist. Hist. An. 2,17, 83), the latter for a fabulous serpent like monster (Hesiod, Theogon. 413, &c.). In Latin, we find only lutra, Plin. 8, 30, 47, which differs not only in the initial, but also in the t, though the Latin should agree with the Greek and Sanskrit and differ from the Ger- *Zend: the language of the Avesta, or ancient sacred writings of the Per- sians. The people who used it were a branch of the Asiatic Aryans.—Tjr.

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