36 The Naturalist in La Plata. 
the victor; and this is borne out by the finding 
of the bodies of bears, which have evidently 
perished in the struggle. 
How strange that this most cunning, bold, and 
bloodthirsty of the Felide, the persecutor of the 
jaguar and the scourge of the ruminants in the 
regions it inhabits, able to kill its prey with the 
celerity of a rifle bullet, never attacks a human 
bemg! Even the cowardly, carrion-feeding dog 
will attack a man when it can do so with impunity ; 
but in places where the puma is the only large 
beast of prey, it is notorious that it is there per- 
fectly safe for even a small child to go out and 
sleep on the plain. At the same time it will not 
fly from man (though the contrary is always stated 
in books of Natural History) except in places where 
it is continually persecuted. Nor is this all: it 
will not, as a rule, even defend itself against man, 
although in some rare instances it has been known 
to do so. 
The mysterious, gentle instinct of this ungentle 
species, which causes the gauchos of the pampas 
to name it man’s friend—‘‘ amigo del cristiano ’’— 
has been persistently ignored by all travellers and 
naturalists who have mentioned the puma. They 
have thus made it a very incongruous creature, 
strong enough to kill a horse, yet so cowardly 
withal that it invariably flies from a human beme— 
even from a sleeping child! Possibly its real re- 
putation was known to some of those who have 
spoken about it; if so, they attributed what they 
heard to the love of the marvellous and the ro- 
mantic, natural to the non-scientific mind; or else 
