CATS GREAT AND SMALL 145 



lar black rosettes. It has a long, bushy tail which is equally thick 

 throughout almost the entire length. The long thick fur admirably 

 protects this beautiful species during the rigours of Winter, and at 

 such time the fur is particularly lovely. Resorting to treeless wastes, 

 observations of this Leopard are infrequent, and whilst its food 

 probably resembles that of its better known relative, the Ounce does 

 not apparently climb trees nor attack mankind. 



PUMA. The Puma (Fig. no), or Mountain Lion, as it is also 

 called, is a splendid American example of the great Cats. Mr. 

 Ingersoll has well said of this animal that "until the invasion of his 

 domain by civilization, he possessed the whole continent from near 

 Hudson Bay to the Strait of Magellan. No other land animal what- 

 ever has so great a north and south range; and when one thinks of 

 the wide contrasts in climate and conditions generally to which it 

 must accommodate itself, one would expect to find a bewildering 

 variety of forms. On the contrary, it would be hard to find a species 

 so uniform as this. There is little or nothing by which any man 

 might say whether a certain skin came from the Orinoco jungles, or 

 the Patagonian pampas, or from some old canyon in the Rockies. 

 The earliest visitors to this continent (America) mistook the skins 

 they saw in the hands of the Indians for those of true Lions, or 

 rather of Lionesses, for they missed the mane. Our ' Mountain 

 Lion ' is a survival of this, strengthened by the fact that the Spanish- 

 speaking people from California to Cape Horn still say Leon. In 

 New England, however, a worse error took its place, giving it the 

 name Panther, or ' Painter,' as Natty Bumppo and his tribe pro- 

 nounced it. * Puma ' is Peruvian, and the best name, because, in 

 addition to its being a native and an easy word, it alone appears 

 to refer to this very animal ; for ' Cougar ' is a made word, coined or 

 borrowed by Buffon." 



Whilst, then, the Lion and Tiger are both absent from the New 

 World, the Puma is a worthy representative of this splendid feline 

 race. The adult is unspotted and differs widely in this respect from 

 the Jaguar of the South, "the biggest, handsomest and most formid- 

 able of American Cats." To quote the same writer again : "Since 

 it" (the Jaguar) "exactly takes the place in our tropical forests of 

 the Tiger of Southern Asia, it is named ' el tigre ' throughout 

 Spanish America, or * onea ' (in Spanish, onza) among the Portu- 

 guese of Brazil. ' Jaguar,' * Juarite ' and the like are derived from 

 Guaranese Indian words explained at length by Azara. But the term 



