DESULTORY SKETCHES IN NATURAL HISTORY. 61 



effected, they will carry off culinary utensils, or whatever may lie 

 in their way that smells of food ; and the next morning, if the foot- 

 steps of the beast be followed (as is customary on such occasions), 

 the article may be found at the distance of perhaps a mile, hidden 

 in some bush, or slightly buried in the soil. They feed addition- 

 ally, however, and sometimes to a considerable extent, on bulbs, 

 which they scratch up ; and so fastidious (according to the travel- 

 ler Bruce) is the Striped Hyaena in the choice of this vegetable 

 diet, that, on crushing them, it rejects all that manifest any stain 

 or flavour of rottenness, devouring only the very finest. This fact 

 of their resorting partly to vegetable regimen derives a particular 

 interest from the circumstance of the almost total atrophy of the tu- 

 berculated portion of their cheek-teeth. 



Of the Hyaena's amazing power of jaw, the following notice oc- 

 curs in Dr. Buckland's Reliquice Deluviance, as observed by him in 

 an individual of the Spotted species fH, crocuta). " The shin 

 bone of an Ox being presented to this Hysena, he began to bite off 

 with his molar teeth large fragments from its upper extremity, and 

 swallowed them whole as often as they were broken off. On his 

 reaching the medullary cavity the bone split into angular fragments, 

 many of which he caught up greedily, and swallowed entire. He 

 went on cracking it till he had extracted all the marrow, licking 

 out the lowest portion of it with his tongue : this done, he left 

 untouched the lower condyle, which contains no marrow, and is 

 very hard. * * * I gave the animal successively three shin 

 bones of a Sheep ; he snapped them asunder in a moment, dividing 

 each into two parts only, which he swallowed entire, without the 

 smallest mastication. On the keeper putting a spar of wood two 

 inches in diameter into his den, he cracked it in pieces as if it had 



Africa^ furnishes some most appalling accounts of the rapacity of the Spotted 

 Hysena. He states that Mr. Shepstone (a missionary), in a letter from 

 Mamboland, relates that the nightly attacks of Wolves, as these animals are 

 currently denominated in South Africa, have been very destructive among 

 the children and youth ; for within a few months not fewer than forty in- 

 stances came to his knowledge, wherein that beast had made a most dread- 

 ful havoc. Among other cases, Mr. Shepstone particularizes two, one that 

 of a boy about ten years of age, and the other of a little girl about eight, 

 who had been carried off by this species and wretchedly mangled, but were 

 recovered by the attention of that gentleman and his companions. Niebuhr 

 likewise informs us that the Striped Hyaenas about Gamboon, in the season 

 when the inhabitants sleep in the open air, snatch away children from the 

 sides of their parents. — Dcscr- Arable, 147> as quoted by Pennant. 



