ENV is not a Hash but Object in Ruby

Recently I hit this funny problem in ruby, when trying to merge options to ENV. Although ENV supports most of Hash functions, it's not really Hash instance:

irb(main):001:0> ENV.class
=> Object
irb(main):002:0> env = { 'X'=>1 }
=> {"X"=>1}

irb(main):003:0> env.class
=> Hash

There are some useful methods missing from ENV like merge!

irb(main):004:0> ENV.merge(env)
NoMethodError: undefined method `merge' for #<object:0xb7f54814>
       from (irb):4

Workaround is simple enough, merge! hash manualy:

irb(main):012:0> env.each { |k,v| ENV[k.to_s]=v.to_s }
=> {"X"=>1}
irb(main):013:0> ENV["X"]
=> "1"