BADGER(Adeles), a family of Plantigrade Carnivora, possessing greatly elongated bodies and short limbs, each of the latter furnished with five toes, provided at their extremities with long, powerful claws, by means of which they form deep burrows in the earth. The carnassial tooth, which in the bears is wholly tuberculate, is in the badgers provided also with a cutting edge, their whole dentition being specially adapted to the partly vegetable, partly animal diet on which they subsist. The badger differs from all other mammals in having the lower jaw so articulated to the upper, by means of a transverse condyle firmly locked into a long cavity of the cranium, that dislocation of the jaw is all but impossible, and this enables those creatures to maintain their hold with the utmost tenacity. The European badger (Adeles Taxus) may be taken as typical of the entire family. It is nowhere abundant, but is found over the entire northern parts of Europe and Asia. It is a quiet, inoffensive animal, nocturnal and solitary in. its habits, sleeping by day in its burrow, and issuing forth at night to feed on roots, beech-mast, fruits, the eggs of birds, some of the smaller quadrupeds, frogs, and insects. It is said also to dig up the nests of wasps in order to eat the larvae, as the ratel—a closely allied .South African form—is said to rob the bees of their honey. The male and female are seldom seen together, and are supposed to trace each other by means of the odour of the secretion contained in a glandular pouch beneath the tail· Although the badger does not seek to attack, yet, when driven to bay, its great muscular power and tough hide renders it a formidable antagonist, as was often seen in the days, now happily gone by, when badger-baiting was a favourite amusement of the ...

תחש. This word in a plural form occurs, Exod. xxv, 5; xxvi, 14; xxxv, 7, 23; xxxvi, 19; xxxix, 34; Num. iv, 6, 8, 10–12, 14, 25; Ezek. xvi, 10; and is joined with ערת, skins used for the covering of the tabernacle in the wilderness. The Jewish interpreters are agreed as to its being some animal. Jarchi says it was a beast of many colours, which no more exists. Kimchi holds the same opinion. Aben Ezra thinks it some animal of the bovine kind, of whose skins shoes are made; alluding to Ezek. xvi, 10. Most modern interpreters have taken it to be the badger, and among these our English translators; but, in the first place, the badger is not an inhabitant of Arabia; and there is nothing in its skin peculiarly proper either for covering a tabernacle or making shoes. Hasæus, Michaelis, and others, have laboured to prove that it is the mermaid, or _homo marinus_, the _trichekus_ of Linnæus. Faber, Dathe, and Rosenmuller, think that it is the seal, or sea calf, _vitulus marinus_, the skin of which is both strong and pliable, and was accounted by the ancients as a most proper outer covering for tents, and was also made into shoes, as Rau has clearly shown. Niebuhr says, “A merchant of Abushahr called _dahash_ that fish which the captains in English vessels call porpoise, and the Germans, sea hog. In my voyage from Maskat to Abushahr, I saw a prodigious quantity together near Ras Mussendom, that were all going the same way, and seemed to swim with great vehemence.” Bochart thinks that not an _animal_, but a _colour_, was intended, Exodus xxv, 5; so that the covering of the tabernacle was to be azure, or sky blue.