The Puma 259 



were no doubt first reclaimed from savage life in Egypt. 

 On the Lower Nile domestic cats were sacred to Pasht, 

 whom the Greeks called Bubastis, and identified with Ar- 

 temis. She was represented with the head of a cat or 

 lioness, as was Sechet also, a divinity equivalent to the 

 Phoenician Astarte. 



These personifications were not meaningless. Bast or 

 Sechet was the patroness of the baser passions and more 

 destructive vices. It was her part, likewise, to torture 

 the condemned in the lower world. Naturalists (Pasto- 

 phori) belonging to the faculties established at " the hall 

 of the ancients " in Heliopolis, and " the house of Seti " in 

 Thebes, knew much more, and also much less, about 

 zoology and its allied sciences than is popularly sup- 

 posed. 



Felis concolor, the puma, cougar, panther, mountain lion, 

 etc., is more correctly called by the last of these names than 

 by that of panther, under which he is commonly known 

 throughout the northern part of this continent. In its 

 habits the puma is said, but not with any great degree of 

 appropriateness, to resemble the leopard more closely than 

 any feline species. Buffon called it the American lion, but 

 he knew very little about this animal, and his opinion upon 

 its character is of no special importance. E. F. im Thurn 

 (" Among the Indians of Guiana") remarks that in the 

 southern part of America, and particularly in Guiana, all 

 varieties of feral cats take their titles from the kind of 

 game upon which they principally subsist. Thus Felis 

 concolor is called "the deer tiger," Felis nigra the "tapir 

 tiger," and Felis macnera the " peccary tiger." Such may 



