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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 Cumming 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. 
