26 History of Nature. [ BOOK VIII. 



of many Lions in the Woods by her Speech, having ventured 

 to say that she was a Woman, a banished one, Feeble, a 

 Suppliant to the noblest of all other living Creatures, the 

 Commander of all the rest, and unworthy that his Glory 

 should prey upon her. The Opinions concerning these things 

 are various, according to the Bias of each Person, or the 

 Occurrences that have happened to him. Whether Savage 

 Beasts are appeased by kind Words, the more especially 

 as also whether Serpents may be fetched out of their Holes 1 

 by Song, and kept under for Punishment, is true or no, Ex- 

 perience hath not yet determined. The Tail 2 is an Index to 



1 See the account of the Psylli, book vii. chap. 2. Wern. Club. 



3 It was a common opinion among the ancients that the lion lashes his 

 sides with his tail to stimulate himself into rage ; hence Pliny calls the 

 tail the index of the lion's mind. But they do not seem to have adverted 

 to any peculiarity in that member, to which so extraordinary a function 

 might, however incorrectly, be attributed. Didymus Alexandrinus ap- 

 pears to have been the first person who, entertaining this fancy, noticed a 

 prickle at the end of the tail, in his comment on the twentieth book of the 

 Iliad, where the lion's rage is mentioned, 



" Such the lion's rage, 



***** 



Lash'd by his tail his heaving sides resound ; 

 He calls up all his rage." 



" The lion," he says, " has a black prickle on his tail, like a horn ; when 

 punctured with which he is still more irritated by the pain." This 

 prickle was by many long looked upon as a mere fiction, till the matter 

 was put beyond a doubt, some years since, by Professor Blumenbach, 

 who upon dissection discovered on the very tip of the tail of a lioness a 

 small dark-coloured spine, as hard as a piece of horn, and surrounded at 

 its base with an annular fold of skin. It is, however, only occasionally 

 found ; nor is it confined to the lion, for it has been discovered in the 

 Asiatic leopard. Mr. Wood (" Zool. Proc." 1832) remarks that it is dif- 

 ficult to conjecture the use of these prickles, their application as a stimulus 

 to anger being of course out of the question ; but he observes that it could 

 not be very important, for, to say nothing of their small size and envelope- 

 ment in the fur, the majority of individuals, in consequence of the readi- 

 ness with which the part is detached, are deprived of it for the remainder 

 of their lives. The writer of this note has had an opportunity of seeing 

 and feeling the prickle in the tail of a lion's cub, which was whelped in 

 Womb well's menagerie. Wern. Club. 



