m DEATH OF THE SECOND MAN-EATER 105 
Also, The Spectator of March 3, 1900, had an 
article entitled ‘‘The Lions that Stopped the 
Railway,” from which the following extracts are 
taken :— 
“The parallel to the story of the lions which 
stopped the rebuilding of Samaria must occur to 
everyone, and if the Samaritans had quarter as 
good cause for their fears as had the railway coolies, 
their wish to propitiate the local deities is easily 
understood. If the whole body of lion anecdote, 
from the days of the Assyrian Kings till the last 
year of the nineteenth century, were collated and 
brought together, it would not equal in tragedy or 
atrocity, in Savageness or in sheer insolent contempt 
for man, armed or unarmed, white or black, the 
story of these two beasts. 
“To what a distance the whole story carries us 
back, and how impossible it becomes to account for 
the survival of primitive man against this kind of 
foe! For fire—which has hitherto been regarded 
as his main safeguard against the carnivora—these 
cared nothing. It is curious that the Tsavo lions 
were not killed by poison, for strychnine is easily 
used, and with effect.1 Poison may have been used 
early in the history of man, for its powers are 
employed with strange skill by the men in the 
tropical forest, both in American and West Central 
1 I may mention that poison was tried, but without effect. The 
poisoned carcases of transport animals which had died from the bite 
of the tsetse fly were placed in likely spots, but the wily man-eaters 
would not touch them, and much preferred live men to dead donkeys. 
