ix 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. 



