The Leopard and Panther 141 



and wild pigs in great numbers. Perhaps a wild boar, the 

 " grim gray tusker " of Anglo-Indian tales and hunting 

 songs, "laughs at a panther," as General Shakespear 

 ("Wild Sports of India") declares. But all the weaker 

 members of his race become victims to this spotted rob- 

 ber's partiality for pork. Monkeys, too, from the sacred 

 Hanuman down through all secular grades, are eaten with 

 avidity by these animals, and they kill great quantities of 

 them despite their cunning. There is nothing alive of 

 which monkeys are so much afraid. 



Both leopards and panthers can endure thirst much better 

 than tigers, and the latter are cave-dwellers to a greater 

 extent than any of the larger Felidce. They only drink 

 once in twenty-four hours, and always at night. Their 

 retreats lie amid low, arid, rocky hills covered with under- 

 brush, traversed by gullies whose sides have been washed 

 out into recesses by floods, and their rocks worn away 

 into caves by weathering or percolation. They are much 

 more active and energetic than their striped relatives, can 

 better endure fatigue, and are, as a rule, bolder and more 

 enterprising. 



It is very far from being a fact, however, that "the 

 habits of leopards are invariably the same " ; that is an 

 error into which Sir Samuel Baker was betrayed by the 

 doctrine of instinct, and which has likewise been shared 

 by nearly every other writer upon natural history. There 

 is a certain sameness in the behavior of such creatures, as 

 there is in that of all classes of animals leading similar 

 lives ; but this is as much as it is possible to say. In some 

 localities, for example, the panther is strictly nocturnal ; in 



