Skunk
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Skunk. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
a well known member of the weasel family. Skunk is an Indian name. Polecat is French, meaning poultry cat, a very appropriate name, for the animal is a persistent chicken thief. The common American skunk or polecat is about twenty-eight inches long. It is usually black with white stripes running along the sides of the back. The tip of the tail and nape of the neck are also white. The skunk ranges from Hudson Bay to Mexico, seeming to maintain its ground in thickly settled communities. Although a weasel, the skunk resembles the badger and wolverine in appearance. A skunk looking still more like a badger is found in South America . The favorite diet of the skunk consists of squirrels, chipmunks, birds, and young poultry. Eggs, either of birds or of domestic fowls, are its delight. It is a great prowler at night. It has an annoying habit of entering the poultry yard and stealing eggs and even entire broods of chickens and young ducks. It does its work so stealthily and skillfully that the parent bird may be found in the morning sitting on the nest unconscious of her loss. Three American quadrupeds are noted for sluggishness and apparent stupidity. The first is the opossum, which depends for protection on its ability to feign death. The second is the porcupine, which depends on its quill-covered back and the painful wounds it is able to inflict by striking with its quill-covered tail. The third is the skunk, which is either too indolent or too stupid to seek safety by ordinary means. It relies on an abominably fetid liquid which is stored up in glands near the insertion of the tail, and which it is able to discharge with a sickening effect upon its enemies, particularly dog and man. The question has been raised whether or not all three, naturally related as they are to some of the most wary, agile, and intelligent of animals, would not have developed a similar quickness and ability to take care of themselves, if they had not been provided by nature with these strange methods of defense. The fur of the skunk is fine and serviceable. It may be deprived of any fetid odor in various ways. One method is that of trampling the pelts in mahogany sawdust. Seventy thousand skunk skins are marketed yearly in the North Central States. The manufactured fur is sold under the name of marten and other aliases.
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
the Mephitis, a genus of small carnivorous quadrupeds of the family Mustelidæ. The body is elongated, SKUNK and usually much arched; the tail long and thickly covered with long, fine hair; the head small, with thick, blunt snout; the legs short, and the paws comparatively large, with five incompletely divided toes. The general color is black and white. The power, characteristic in some degree of all the Mustelidæ, of forcibly discharging the fetid secretion of the anal glands is in the skunks enormously developed. river of Iowa
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Both accounts file the skunk with the weasels: Aiton's calls it "a well known member of the weasel family" and Collier's places Mephitis in the Mustelidae. That grouping no longer holds — DNA work published in 1997 by Jerry Dragoo and Rodney Honeycutt moved skunks (and the Asian stink badgers) into a family of their own, Mephitidae, so the skunk is now only a distant cousin of the weasel. Aiton's picture of a chicken-and-egg thief "too indolent or too stupid to seek safety by ordinary means" has also gone: skunks eat mainly insects, grubs and small rodents, and the bold black-and-white pattern is read today as warning coloration, an advertisement rather than a symptom of dullness. The fur trade that consumed 70,000 pelts a year in the North Central States has all but vanished, and the animal's chief significance now is as one of the main wildlife reservoirs of rabies in North America.
Written for this edition, 2026.