72 NATURAL HISTORY ESSAYS 



notes and drawintrs of the cheetah ; nevertheless, 

 naturalists continued to be dubious re the identity 

 of the Asiatic with the African form. At last, in 

 1820, Cuvier was able to examine a /zW;/^' specimen, 

 which had been presented to the Jardin des Plantes 

 by M. Le Coupe, Governor of Senegal. Tame as a 

 dog, this beast was allowed to take the air during 

 summer in an outdoor enclosure ; it seems to have 

 lived about three years in the menagerie, and was 

 probably the young specimen eventually figured 

 under the name of guepard. By means of this indi- 

 vidual, the French naturalist was enabled to prove 

 that the Asiatic and African cheetahs were one and 

 the same animal, so that the question was finally set 

 at rest.^ In 1827, the Pays Bas Museum at Leyden 

 contained specimens of both forms, which afforded 

 an interesting opportunity of comparing Western 

 and Eastern cheetahs side by side. Some ten 

 years later, the museum of the London Zoological 

 Society also contained an example of each, which 

 had died in the menagerie. 



Although European zoologists thus spent con- 

 siderable time in an academical study of the 

 cheetah, the unscientific Orientals had for centuries 

 turned its hunting proclivities to practical account. 

 Far from troubling themselves over abstruse 

 questions of internal anatomy or external mark- 



1 A skill of an African cheetah was presented by Biirchell to the 

 Britisli Museum, probably in 1817, when lie also gave a blue wildebeest 

 and other specimens to that institution. 



