THE STRIPED HY NA. 10 
Nothing, however filthy, comes amiss to their voracious 
appetites, which are indeed unbounded. They even 
break into the cemeteries of the dead, and tearing open 
the graves by means of their powerful claws, disinter the 
buried corpses, on which they glut that horrid propensity 
for feeding on carrion, which is at once the most striking 
and the most disgusting of their peculiarities. Their 
fondness for this polluted species of food tends of course 
not a little to increase the natural antipathy with which 
they are regarded by the natives of the countries in 
which they abound, and renders them objects of pecu- 
liar detestation and abhorrence. The great size and 
strength of their teeth and the immense power of their 
jaws enable them to crush the largest bones with com- 
parative facility, and account for the avidity with which 
they prey upon an almost fleshless skeleton. In the 
daytime they retire into caves, from which they issue 
only when the shades of evening warn them that the 
hour for their depredations has arrived. Their gait is 
awkward and usually slow and constrained; when 
scared, however, from their prey, or when pursued by 
the hunter, they fly with tolerable swiftness, but still 
with an appearance of lameness in their motions, result- 
ing from the constant bending of their posterior legs. 
Notwithstanding the brutal voracity of his habits and 
the savage fierceness of his disposition, there is scarcely 
any animal that submits with greater facility to the 
control of man. In captivity, especially when taken 
young, a circumstance on which much depends in the 
domestication of all wild animals, he is capable of being 
rendered exceedingly tame, and even serviceable. In 
some parts of Southern Africa the spotted species, which 
