The Puma, or Lion of America. 53 
no foundation for stories of this character, it is 
really a very wonderful coincidence that they should 
be met with in countries so widely separated as 
Patagonia and Central America. Pumas, doubtless, 
are scarce in Guatemala; and, as in other places 
where they have met with nothing but persecution 
from man, they are shy of him; but had this adven- 
ture occurred on the pampas, where they are better 
known, the person concerned in it would not have 
said that the puma played with him as a cat with 
a mouse, but rather as a tame cat plays with a 
child; nor, probably, would he have been terrified 
into imagining that the animal, even after its 
caresses had met with so rough a return, was about 
to spring on him. 
In Clavigero’s [History of Lower California, it 
is related that a very extraordinary state of things 
was discovered to exist in that country by the first 
missionaries who settled there at the end of the 
seventeenth century, and which was actually owing 
to the pumas. The author says that there were no 
bears or tigers (jaguars); these had most probably 
been driven out by their old enemies; but the 
pumas had increased to a prodigious extent, so that 
the whole peninsula was overrun by them; and 
this was owing to the superstitious regard in which 
they were held by the natives, who not only did not 
kill them, but never ventured to disturb them in any 
way. The Indians were actually to some extent 
dependent on the puma’s success in hunting for 
their subsistence ; they watched the movements of 
the vultures in order to discover the spot in which 
the remains of any animal it had captured had been 
