34 



The Living Animals of the World 



This closes the list of the most cat-like 

 animals. The next links in the chain 

 are formed by the Civets and Genets, 

 creatures with more or less retractile 

 claws, and long, bushy 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. 



KECENT intrusions for railways, 

 sport, discovery, 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 eighty lions in three 



years ; and in Africa, from Algeria to the Bechuana country. It is especially common in 

 Somaliland, where the modern lion-hunter mainly seeks his sport. On the Uganda Eailway, 

 from Mombasa to Lake Victoria, lions are very numerous and dangerous. In Khodesia and 

 the Northern Transvaal they have killed hunters, railway officials, and 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 

 Old Testament, telling how Samaria was almost deserted a second time from this cause, 

 might be paralleled to-day. 



THE AFRICAN LION. 



BY F. 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 Eiebeck, 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 

 large extent on the domestic flocks and herds which gradually replaced the wild denizens of 



Photo by York & Son] [NoMng Hill. 



LIONESS AROUSED. 

 The pose of the animal here shows attention, but not anger or fear. 



