84 Animal Life 
faded from black to chestnut, and from chestnut to yellow brown, while the ground 
colour of the fur has darkened to buff or greyish brown. The tail has shortened 
and the head has increased in size, developing a long and powerful muzzle.  Struc- 
turally, perhaps, the lion is a little nearer to the leopard stock than is the tiger. The 
immediate parent of the tiger may have been some jaguar-like development of leopard, 
which, like so many of the Asiatic types, found its way to America and died out in 
Asia, developing in Eastern Asia into the much more formidable tiger. The ranges 
of the tiger and the lion formerly overlapped in India, otherwise they divided the old 
world pretty equally between them, the tiger occupying (at one time) all Northern 
Asia, North Persia and Pontus, Afghanistan, India, Malaysia, Sumatra, Java and 
China, while the lion became the king of carnivores in Western Asia, Central 
Europe, and nearly the whole of Africa. 
It is a mistake to say the lion cannot climb. He dislikes trusting his heavy body to 
an insufficient support far 
from the ground, and he 
would find poor satisfaction 
as prey in the small 
mammals and birds which 
haunt the trees; but, at a 
pinch, the lon or loness 
can scramble up a slanting 
tree trunk. From such a 
point of vantage as the fork 
between the branches, some 
ten or fifteen feet above the 
ground, a lion or honess may 
not infrequently scan, with 
roving eyes, the surrounding 
country, and having located 
game, descend noiselessly 
and stalk its prey through 
the brushwood or long grass. 
Mr. Alfred Sharpe, the Com- Photograph by Ww. P. Dando, F.Z.8., Regen 
missioner in British Central e. 
Africa, shot a lion who was 
perched up in the branches of a tree in this manner, and saw other instances in the 
same district (Tanganyika) of lions ascending trees. Similar stories are related in the 
Uganda Protectorate by natives; also in Nyasaland, in parts of which country the hons 
boldly attack the natives in their villages by climbing on to the roofs of their houses, 
tearing open the thatch and stick framework, and descending with a flop on some poor 
huddled group of husband, wife, and child. The terrified negroes did not dare to flee 
from the lion on the roof, because they were well aware that other lions or lionesses 
were waiting outside the dwelling ready to pounce on them, even, it may be, trying to 
break down the reed or palm-frond door. I have passed several deserted villages in 
West Nyasaland, in the days before guns were widespread in use, which had only 
been abandoned by the people because of the bold and persistent attacks of lions 
during the night, and even occasionally in broad daylight. It is not too much to 
say that gunpowder or the white man, or, in desperate cases, both together, alone 
have quelled the lion plague in parts of Eastern and Central Africa, and have 
rendered repopulation of deserted districts or settlements possible on the part of 
negroes. I can at the time of writing recall villages on the banks of the Shire 
