in zoology. See MUSTELA.

or Ermine, in heraldry, denotes a white field or fur, powdered or interlaced with black spots, called powdering. It is supposed to represent the skin of an animal of the same denomination (see MUSTELA). There is however no animal whose skin naturally corresponds to the herald's ermin.

The animal is milk white; and so far is it from having spots, that tradition reports, that it will rather die or be taken than fully its whiteness. Whence its symbolical use.

But white skins having for many ages been used for the linings of the robes of magistrates and great men; the furriers at length, to add to their beauty, used to sew bits of the black tails of those creatures upon the white skins, to render them the more conspicuous. Which alteration was introduced into armoury.

The sable spots in ermin are not of any determinate number, but they may be more or less at the pleasure of the painter or furrier.

an order of knights, instituted in 1450 by Francis I., duke of Bretagne, and formerly subsisting in France. The collar of this order was of gold, composed of ears of corn in falter; at the end of which hung the ermin, with this inscription, a ma vie. But the order expired when the dukedom of Bretagne was annexed to the crown of France. ERR