528 JOURNAL, BOM BAY NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY, Vol. XI. 



I cannot say. Anyhow it seems a very foolish practice and perhaps they 

 bark for some different reason altogether. I have also heard cheetal making a 

 curious noise like a rattle, which my shikari said was produced by the stag, 

 and as I heard some distance off another answer in a similar way ; the first 

 may have been in the nature of a challenge to a rival. The doe sambhar 

 when alarmed, if it cannot see the cause of the alarm, will often keep on 

 barking for a long time, but I have never heard a stag bark in this way. If 

 with a herd, he allows the does to keep watch for him, though I have seen 

 him pay no attention to their barking but only follow them when they 

 bolted. The only stag I have ever convicted of talking was a young one 

 which, after staring at me for some seconds, went off with a short bark, and I 

 have heard a bull nilgbai make much the same sort of noise. That panthers 

 and tigers hunt by scent seems to me rather doubtful. — I have been in 

 country where, if this were so, I must have frequently come across natural kills. 

 Deer were plentiful, and tiger and panther were always about, yet in many 

 weeks I have only come across one fresh kill by a panther, and scarcely ever 

 seen even the trace of a kill by a tiger. My own theory is that tigers use their 

 noses very little. The tracks of a man or elephant may attract tbem, but the 

 smell produces no impression on their minds ; it does not prompt them either 

 to run away from it or to follow it up, and a man standing behind a tree 

 would have just as good a chance of a shot as if he were sitting in the tree. 

 Their powers of memory are marvellous. A tiger will often go miles away 

 from his kill and return to it again the next night, but if you drag it away a 

 few yards and hide it he is often unable to find his expected dinner. One 

 often has to drag away a kill so that it a ay be within convenient distance of 

 the tree in which the maehan is erected, and I certainly know of one case 

 where the tij*er came back to where he had killed, went to the place where 

 he had himself dragged the kill, but could not follow it any further. Again a 

 tiger will often pass within a few yards of a " gurah " tied up without appa- 

 rently having noticed it, and though it may be said that he had been rendered 

 suspicious by scenting the tracks of the men who had tied up or fed the 

 " gurah " if this were the reason no tiger would ever kill a " gurah ". 



N. C, MACLEOD. 

 Bombay, 20th October, 1897. 



No. Ill— THE DESTRUCTION OF LOCUSTS BY MEANS 



OF ARSENIC. 



Cultivators in many regions of the globe will be interested in what appears 

 to have been a successful series of locust-destroying experiments carried out 

 in Natal, a report of which has been published in that colony as a Government 

 notice. From a note in the Times, it appears that all attempts to suppress the 

 locust scourge have proved only partially successful, with the excep- 



