Lion’s Back.
Fig. 37.—Back of Lion, showing reversed area of hair with whorl at A. Feathering B. Crest C.
The strange pattern of reversed hair (Fig. 37) is much the most notable of the three peculiarities found on the lion’s skin. It consists of a whorl (A) lying over the lumbar region in the middle line which expands into a very broad feathering (B) and terminates in a crest (C) a short distance behind the level of the shoulders. This is not found in any of the numerous short-haired Felidæ that I have examined, and it is a feature which demands explanation. I know no other mammal, ungulate or carnivore, that has any pattern resembling this; indeed, if one were to photograph the pattern in question and a few inches of the skin surrounding it, and be told that it came from the back of a mammal one could not doubt that it was a hall-mark of the King of Beasts. It would not produce that thrill of intense interest which we felt at the meeting on 7th May, 1901, at the Zoological Society of London, when from a water colour sketch and three pieces of skin taken from the body of a hitherto unknown mammal, Sir Harry Johnston proceeded to reconstruct the Okapi, at first dubbed knight, as a member of the Equidæ, but later promoted downwards to the Giraffidæ. But one could do no less, with some knowledge of the hair of mammals, than reconstruct from such a photograph a large, powerful and ferocious carnivore, and where but in the lion can the greatest example of those attributes be found? I say this advisedly, for this remarkable pattern of the lion’s back is as much a stamp of his moral or mental quality as the Inguinal Pedometer is of the locomotive rôle in life of equus caballus.
I hear the sharp voice of the critic here, “Come, come, you may have shown reason for the latter, but how on earth do mental and moral qualities of an animal come into your scheme?” Well, we have in this pattern of the lion’s back to deal with a unique phenomenon for the production of which neither pressure, nor friction, nor gravitation, nor underlying muscular traction will account. Nevertheless, it is a result of muscular action of a rare kind. Who does not know the striking appearance of the hair along the centre of a short-haired dog when he bristles up with rage or fear, or both combined, at the sight of a foe? This common event has its own mechanical cause, though it is one strictly governed by the mental and moral qualities of the dog, and we see the vivid proof before us of the action of the minute arrectores pili, in this particular region of the dog. It is precisely in the same situation that the special pattern of the lion’s hair is found. It is not for nothing that Nature has provided every tiny hair of the mammalian skin with that insignificant little band of muscle which lies within the hair-pit, and is attached to the sloping hair on its posterior side, and thus when it contracts serves to drag it into an erect position. I refrain from discussing what may be held to be the survival value, under the theory of selection, of this power of the arrectores pili to confer on the possessor an added appearance of ferocity and general frightfulness. This is quite a likely explanation of the presence of these little muscles. Be that as it may the modus operandi of the reversed hair which has become fixed on the lion’s back is made clear, theory of origin apart. And I submit that the presence of it in this region in this animal is a stamp of his persistently ferocious nature, as much as the various peculiarities of arrangement of hair on man’s eyebrows in a previous chapter are of the mental and moral habits of the individual man. As rulers of old used, in their genial fashion, to brand a supposed or actual criminal on his shoulder or forehead, so is the lion branded with an hereditary mark of his nature and the past life of himself and his ancestors. I doubt not that if short-haired terriers were living a wild life among numerous foes their bristling hair would have become fixed in a similar fashion. I would only here draw the attention of the reader to the fact that this reversed area of hair on the lion’s back cannot be held to add to the general frightfulness of the possessor. It would be invisible to an approaching foe, as it lies hidden behind the great head and mane. This pattern on the lion’s back will be referred to later in a somewhat different connection.