3 Old Rphraim. 



as good eating as the common kind. The records of 

 these early explorers are filled with examples of the 

 ferocious and man-eating propensities of the polar bears ; 

 but in the accounts of most of the later Arctic expeditions 

 they are portrayed as having learned wisdom, and being 

 now most anxious to keep out of the way of the hunters. 

 A number of my sporting friends have killed white bears, 

 and none of them were ever even charged. And in 

 South Africa the English sportsmen and Dutch boers 

 have taught the lion to be a very different creature from 

 what it was when the first white man reached that con- 

 tinent. If the Indian tiger had been a native of the 

 United States, it would now be one of the most shy 

 of beasts. Of late years our estimate of the grizzly's 

 ferocity has been lowered ; and we no longer accept 

 the tales of uneducated hunters as being proper au- 

 thority by which to judge it. But we should make a 

 parallel reduction in the cases of many foreign animals 

 and their describers. Take, for example, that purely 

 melodramatic beast, the North African lion, as portrayed 

 by Jules Gerard, who bombastically describes himself as 

 " le tueur des lions." Gerard's accounts are self-evidently 

 in large part fictitious, while if true they would prove less 

 for the bravery of the lion than for the phenomenal cow- 

 ardice, incapacity, and bad marksmanship of the Algerian 

 Arabs. Doubtless Gerard was a great hunter ; but so is 

 many a Western plainsman, whose account of the grizzlies 

 he has killed would be wholly untrustworthy. Take for 

 instance the following from page 223 of "La Chasse au 

 Lion " : " The inhabitants had assembled one day to the 



