THE LEOPARD. 85 



man-eating Leopard that had killed about 150 people, some 

 thirty miles from Rampur Bauleah. 



Leopards are also not free from the charge of occasionally 

 eating one another, as proved by the following note contributed 

 by Major H. D. Olivier to the " Journal " of the Bombay 

 Natural History Society for 1893. The letter runs as follows : 



" In 1884 I was staying with D., a forest-officer in the Panch 

 Mahals, near to Sodhra. Whilst we were sitting out one even- 

 ing on the side of a hill, where we had been for a walk, a Pan- 

 ther came along and stood within ten yards of us. D. had a 

 rifle with him, but on my whispering to him that there was a 

 Panther close by him, he turned round so quickly that the 

 Panther saw him and disappeared. We decided to tie up a 

 couple of Goats, but nothing came that night except a Hyaena, 

 which D. shot. The next evening, however, D. wounded a 

 Panther, but it was too late to follow it up. During the night 

 we heard one calling for its mate all over the hill, and next 

 morning, whilst searching for tracks, our attention was called 

 by one of the men to something in the fork of a large tree close 

 by, and on nearer inspection this turned out to be the body of 

 the wounded Panther, whose hind-quarters were half-eaten, and 

 the skin, of course, worried. The 'gallant husband' who had 

 performed this act of cannibalism had left the marks of his 

 claws on the tree, where some five feet above the ground he 

 had sprung up on to the trunk. 



"Most sportsmen will remember having, in the course of 

 their shooting expeditions, come across trees which, from the 

 marks of blood on some large fork, were evidently regular 

 resorts to which the resident Panther of the neighbourhood 

 was in the habit of taking its prey for consumption, and this 

 tree was a case in point." 



To give some idea of the ravages committed by Leopards 

 and Tigers, we may quote from the Government Report for the 



