The characteristics of the Cats and their allies are too well known to need description. We will therefore only mention the chief types of the group, and proceed to give, in the fullest detail which space allows, authentic anecdotes of their life and habits. The tribe includes Lions, Tigers, Leopards, Pumas, Jaguars, a large number of so-called Tiger-cats (spotted and striped), Wild Cats, Domestic Cats, and Lynxes. The Hunting-leopard, or Cheeta, stands in a sub-group by itself, as does the Fossa, the only large carnivore of Madagascar. This closes the list of the most cat-like animals. The next links in the chain are formed by the Civets and Genets, creatures with more or less retractile claws, and long, bushy tails; the still less cat-like Binturong, a creature with a prehensile tail; and the Mongooses and Ichneumons, more and more nearly resembling the weasel tribe.
THE LION.
Recent intrusions for railways, sport, discovery, and war into Central and East Africa have opened up new lion countries, and confirmed, in the most striking manner, the stories of the power, the prowess, and the dreadful destructiveness to man and beast of this king of the Carnivora. At present it is found in Persia, on the same rivers where Nimrod and the Assyrian kings made its pursuit their royal sport; in Gujerat, where it is nearly extinct, though in General Price's work on Indian game written before the middle of the last century it is stated that a cavalry officer killed eighty lions in three years; and in Africa, from Algeria to the Bechuana country. It is especially common in Somaliland, where the modern lion-hunter mainly seeks his sport. On the Uganda Railway, from Mombasa to Lake Victoria, lions are very numerous and dangerous. In Rhodesia and the Northern Transvaal they have killed hunters, railway officials, and even our soldiers near Komati Poort. It has been found that whole tracts of country are still often deserted by their inhabitants from fear of lions, and that the accounts of their ravages contained in the Old Testament, telling how Samaria was almost deserted a second time from this cause, might be paralleled to-day.
Photo by York & Son] [Notting Hill.
LIONESS AROUSED.
The pose of the animal here shows attention, but not anger or fear.
The African Lion.
BY F. C. SELOUS.
When, in the latter half of the seventeenth century, Europeans first settled at the Cape of Good Hope, the lion's roar was probably to be heard almost nightly on the slopes of Table Mountain, since a quaint entry in the Diary of Van Riebeck, the first Dutch governor of the Cape, runs thus: "This night the lions roared as if they would take the fort by storm"—the said fort being situated on the site of the city now known as Cape Town.