THE IDEA OF MURDER IN ANIMALS, 807 



teeth little better than daggers of the most terrible kind, hundreds 

 do frequently escape from conflict with a lion, sometimes almost 

 unwounded. Meunier, one of the most illustrious French ob- 

 servers of animal psychology, narrates how a certain man named 

 Botta was once knocked down by a lion, kept in a perilous posi- 

 tion for some time, bruised all over, and badly bitten in the arm, 

 after which the lion went away, leaving the man very seriously 

 but not dangerously wounded. Delagorgue cites a lion hunter 

 who found himself in the same predicament twice within seven 

 years after having fired at a lion. The first time the lion con- 

 tented himself with fracturing both the hunter's arms ; the second 

 time it inflicted six bites and clawed him in several parts of the 

 body, and on neither occasion did it proceed to further reprisals. 

 Another man, Vermaes by name, a farmer living near the source 

 of the Mooi, a tributary of the Tanguela, in Natal, one evening 

 espied a lioness assailing his cattle. Directly he saw her he fired 

 and hit her ; but the animal sprang upon him and knocked him 

 down. The man afterward described how he had felt : his ears 

 stunned by the animal's hoarse roars, how he had seen two jaws 

 armed with long white teeth opened wide above him ; how he 

 had felt the two sides of his chest being crunched together all 

 the way down ; after that, nothing more. He was picked up 

 bleeding from this one bite, after giving which the lioness had 

 departed. 



These facts seem to show that the lion is not consciously aware 

 of his power of destroying the life of another living creature. He 

 springs upon his enemy in order to wreak his anger, and bites 

 instinctively, but not to kill him. Hence he bites at random 

 wherever chance offers, without allowing himself to be guided by 

 previous experience, which would have shown him that certain 

 bites given in a certain way may cause death ; and as soon as he 

 has satisfied the need he feels of relieving his rage by biting he 

 goes away. 



The lion, then, is a dangerous beast, not because he is ferocious 

 in the sense that he enjoys the sensation of successful slaughter 

 he has not reached the idea of death, and hence can not realize 

 his vast power to inflict it ; he is ferocious because he bites when 

 infuriated, and because the bites of an animal so powerfully en- 

 dowed by Nature are of terrible consequence. Hence it follows 

 that when he strikes his prey so definitely on the neck before de- 

 vouring it, he does so not with the distinct idea of killing it, but 

 merely because experience has shown him that after having 

 struck it in this particular way he can most easily devour it ; and 

 this fact also explains why he does not strike in the same way 

 when he springs upon another creature, not for food, but in a fury 

 of self-defense. 



