34 



THK LIVING ANIMALS OF THE WORLD 



This closes the list of the most cat-like 

 animals. The next links in the chain 

 arc formed by the Civets and Genets, 

 creatures with more or less retractile 

 claws, and long, bush)- tails ; the still 

 less cat-like Binturong, a creature with 

 a prehensile tail ; and the Mongooses 

 and Ichneumons, more and more nearly 

 resembling the weasel tribe. 



THE LION 



Recent intrusions for railways, 

 sport, discover)-, and war into Central 

 and East Africa have opened up new 

 lion countries, and confirmed, in the most 

 striking manner, the stories of the power, 

 the prowess, and the dreadful destruc- 

 tiveness to man and beast of this king 

 of the Carnivora. At present it is found 

 in Persia, on the same rivers where 

 Nimrod and the Assyrian kings made its 

 pursuit their royal sport; in Gujerat, 

 where it is nearly extinct, though in 

 General Price's work on Indian game 

 written before the middle of the last 

 century it is stated that a cavalry officer 

 killed eight)- lions in three years ; and in Africa, from Algeria to the Bechuana country. It 

 i- especially common in Somaliland, where the modern lion-hunter mainly seeks his sport. 

 On the Uganda Railway, from Mombasa to Lake Victoria, lions are very numerous and 

 dangerous. In Rhodesia and the Northern Transvaal the)- have killed hunters, railway officials, 

 ami even our soldiers near Komati Poort. It has been found that whole tracts of country are 

 still often deserted by their inhabitants from fear of lions, and that the accounts of their ravages 

 contained in the ( (Id Testament, telling how Samaria was almost deserted a second time from 

 this cause, might be paralleled to-day. 



The African Lion 



BY !■'. C. SELOUS 



When, in the latter half of the seventeenth century, Europeans first settled at the Cape 

 of Good Hope, the lion's roar was probably to be heard almost nightly on the slopes of Table 

 Mountain, since a quaint entry in the Diary of Van Riebeck, the first Dutch governor of the 

 Cape, runs thus : " This night the lions roared as if they would take the fort by storm " — the said 

 fort being situated on the site of the city now known as Cape Town. 



At that date there can be little doubt that, excepting in the waterless deserts and the dense 

 equatorial forests, lions roamed over the whole of the vast continent of Africa from Cape Agulhas 

 to the very shore of the Mediterranean Sea ; nor was their range very seriously curtailed until 

 the spread of European settlements in North and South Africa, and the acquisition of firearms 

 by the aboriginal inhabitants of many parts of the country, during the latter half of the nineteenth 

 century, steadily denuded large areas of all wild game. 



As the game vanished, the lions disappeared too; for although at first they preyed to a 

 lar^e extent on the domestic flocks and herds which gradually replaced the wild denizens of the 



that b) »V* <&* 4'mi] {Nttting Hill 



LIONESS AROUSED 



Tie pose of the animal here shoivs attention, but not anger or fear 



