LION. 



363 



what to select and what to reject. Moreover, it will be found that in comparing 

 the accounts given by different observers there is considerable diversity between 

 them in regard to certain points. This difference, as observed by the Hon. W. H. 

 Drummond, is doubtless due, to a certain extent, to differences in the habits of lions 

 from different districts ; but to this must be added the " personal equation " of the 

 various observers. 



With regard to the habits of lions, it is probable from the uniformly tawny 

 colour of these animals that they were primitively inhabitants of more or less 

 completely desert or sandy regions, although they are now by no means restricted 

 to such localities. In Africa, as Gordon Gumming relates, lions were formerly 



THE LION AT A POOL. 



abundant in the sandy wastes of the great Kalahari Desert ; while they are now, 

 according to Mr. Selous, equally plentiful in the high open country of Mashonaland, 

 among the rough broken hills through which the tributaries of the Zambesi make 

 their way to the main river, in the dense thorn-jungles lying to the west of the 

 Gwai River, or in the marshes of the Linyanti River. Then again, whereas the 

 Indian lion was formerly abundant in the sandy plains of Rajputana, the favourite 

 haunts of the animal in Mesopotamia are, as we have seen, in the swampy lowlands 

 of the Tigris and Euphrates valleys. 



Like most of the larger cats, lions are essentially nocturnal in their habits, and 

 they are thus frequently only met with by chance in districts where, from the 

 abundance of their tracks and from their nocturnal roarings, they are known to be 

 plentiful. During the daytime they are accustomed to lie asleep in thick beds of 

 reeds, where such are to be found, or, in drier districts, among thickets and bushes. 



