140 NATURAL HISTORY ESSAYS 



mained savag-e and dangerous after all their 

 travels and repeated change of owner. The 

 present writer studied these unruly creatures : both 

 would strike savagely at the railings in frustrated 

 attempt to injure the bystanders. In 1900 the 

 writer, wishing to photograph a sable in a Con- 

 tinental collection, was surprised at the casual 

 manner in which the keeper threw open the door 

 of the paddock as if the dangerous tenant had been 

 a sheep ! The man even used to enter the paddock, 

 though there could be no question of the individual 

 fierceness of this specimen, as she also would strike 

 (happily from the wrong side of the bars) at visitors! 

 Sable have repeatedly been imported into Europe : 

 living examples were kept at Cologne, Leipzig and 

 Hamburg during recent years. Those in the late 

 Cecil Rhodes' park at Groote Schuur near Cape- 

 town — an ideal situation in their native Africa — 

 became tame enough to lick the hands of visitors. 



The following- notes on the sable now in the 

 Regent's Park collection were made by the writer 

 in May, 1905. Beast in long summer coat; chestnut 

 saturated with black, as if the black had been 

 streaked in fine lines on a chestnut ground, thus 

 giving a curious moist appearance to the pelt. 

 (These fine lines by the way are excellently rendered 

 in a fiofure of the extinct blaauwbok in Knioht's 

 *' Museum of Animated Nature.") The black showed 

 a purplish tinge, perhaps analogous to the bluish cast 



