460 CLASS MAMMALIA. 



word Partialis. The word Panthera, although of Greek 

 root, did not then preserve the sense of the word 'Uavfap, 

 which is constantly marked as different from Pardalis, and 

 by Oppian is said to be small and of little courage. The 

 Romans, nevertheless, sometimes employed it to translate 

 the word ITav0aj/>, 'arid the Greeks of the lower empire, in- 

 duced by the resemblance of the names, have probably 

 attributed to the Panther some of the characters which they 

 found among the Romans, on the Panthera. 



Bocchart, without knowing these animals himself, has 

 collected and compared with much sagacity every thing that 

 the ancients and the orientalists have said about them. He 

 endeavours to clear up these apparent contradictions by 

 a passage in which Oppian characterizes two species of 

 Pardalis, the great with a shorter tail than the less. 



It is to this smaller species that Bocchart would apply the 

 word YlavBnp.' But there are found in the country known 

 to the ancients, two animals with spotted skins ; the com- 

 mon Panther of naturalists, and another animal, which, 

 after Daubenton, is named the Guepard, (the Hunting 

 Leopard.) 



The Arabian authors have there also known and distin- 

 guished two of these animals ; the first under the name of 

 Nemer, the other under that of Fehd, and although Bocchart 

 considers the Fehd to be the Lynx, "I rather incline to 

 think/' says the Baron, " it is the Hunting Leopard." 



The Guepard, then, would be the Panther, and there is 

 nothing stated by the Greeks repugnant to this idea. 



Sometimes they associate it with the great animals, 

 sometimes with the small, which seems to imply that it 

 was of middling stature. Its young Were born blind, says 

 Aristotle; it inhabited Africa with the Thos, according to 

 Herodotus ; its skin was spotted, and its natural disposition 

 tameable, as we are informed by Eustathius. 



The two last traits appear inapplicable to any other 



