A leopard’s face, breaking with his mouth a sword, is the crest of Disne.
The supporters of the Earl of Northesk are two leopards reguardant.
The leopard or panther, says Dr. P. M. Duncan, F.R.S.,[22] was the only one of the greater feline animals, except the lion and tiger, which seems to have been known to the ancients. It is always represented as drawing the chariot of Bacchus, and the forlorn Ariadne is sculptured as riding on one of the spotted steeds of her divine lover. The panther was also constantly used in the barbarous sports of the amphitheatre, and, in common with the lion and tiger, has been both executioner and grave to many a bold-hearted martyr.
The leopard’s skin was a favourite mantle in the olden times in Greece. In the “Iliad,” Homer, speaking of Menelaus, says:
“With a pard’s spotted hide his shoulders broad
He mantled o’er,”
and the leopard, or panther, is given in the “Odyssey” as one of the forms assumed by Proteus, “the Ancient of the Deep.”
A curious ancient superstition about the leopard is embodied in its name. It was thought not to be actually the same animal as the panther or pard, but to be a mongrel or hybrid between the male pard and the lioness, hence it was called the lion-panther, or leopardus. This error, as Archbishop Trench tells us, “has lasted into modern times”; thus Fuller: “Leopards and mules are properly no creatures.”
Some writers, says Boutell, describe the leopard as the issue of the pard and lioness, and they assign the unproductiveness of such hybrids as a reason for its frequent adoption in the arms of abbots and abbesses. “Mulus et abbates sunt in honore pares.”
The leopard and panther are now acknowledged to be but slight varieties of the same species. In Wood’s “Natural History” some slight difference is mentioned as to the number of spots. “The panther is fawn-coloured above, white underneath, with six or seven ranges of patches resembling rosettes—that is to say, each composed of an assemblage of five or six simple black spots. It very much resembles the leopard, which inhabits the same region (but has ten rows of spots which are of smaller size), It is the wildest of the feline tribe, always retaining its fierce aspect and perpetual growl.”