78 AFRICAN NATURE NOTES chap. 



to be full-grown animals. Now the Masarwa 

 Bushmen living near the Mababi plain — and these 

 wild people are extraordinarily acute observers — 

 declared that they knew both these pairs of lions 

 well, and said that each pair were the cubs of one 

 mother, and had been hunting together since cub- 

 hood. Curiously enough, in the case of both these 

 pairs of lions the two animals living and hunting 

 together differed from one another very much. In 

 each case one was of a very dark colour all over, 

 with a dark mane, whilst the body of the other was 

 of a pale yellow, and it had scarcely any mane at 

 all. A few days after encountering the second pair 

 of lions, a friend and myself came upon two 

 lionesses on the same open plain, both of which we 

 shot. One of these lionesses was on the point of 

 ofivine birth to three cubs, which we cut out of her 

 womb. Two of these cubs were males, and they 

 differed very much one from another in colour even 

 before birth. One was very dark indeed, owing to 

 the blackish tint of the tips of the hairs of its 

 little fluffy coat. The other was of a reddish 

 yellow. The fur of the female cub was also of a 

 much lighter colour than in the dark male. Now 

 I cannot but adhere to the opinion which I wrote 

 down in my diary at the time, that these two male 

 lion cubs would, had they lived, have grown up into 

 animals differing very much in appearance one from 

 the other. The dark cub would have become a 

 dark-skinned, dark-maned lion, the lighter-coloured 

 one a yellow lion with. probably very little mane. 



Commenting upon such a case as the above, Mr. 

 R. Lydekker, in one of his recently published 

 zoological essays, says that when light- and dark- 

 maned cubs are met with in the same litter it is due 

 to crossing between lions of different races. Mr. 

 Lydekker has also stated that "with regard to the 

 lion, it has now been ascertained that the black- 



