CAENIVOEA. 



FELID^. 



Genus Pel is, Linn. 



* Pelis TIGRIS, Linn. 



Felis tigris, Linn., Syst. Nat. Halae, 10 ed. 1760, p. 41. 



Tigris regalis, Gray, Proc. Zool. Soc. Lond. 1867, p. 623, et Cat. Carniv. etc., Brit. Mus. 1869, 

 p. 10. 



The tiger is very prevalent in the neighbourhood of Bhamo on both banks of 

 the Irawady and of its affluent, the Tapeng ; it is of less frequent occurrence in 

 the Kakhyen hills, but it ascends there to an elevation of 4,000 feet, and is far from 

 uncommon on the hills and in the valleys to the east wherever it can find sufficient 

 cover. Bhamo is enclosed by a stockade about 9 feet high, but this is no protection 

 against the inroads of tigers, which not unfrequently enter the town at night after 

 the gates have been closed at sundown. One tigress, the townspeople asserted, was 

 seen to clear the stockade with a man in her mouth. During my short stay in the 

 town I was present at the hunt after a tigress with her cub which had entered the 

 town and carried off an old woman while sitting making thatch in the verandah of 

 her hut, which was closely surrounded by other dwellings. They are especially 

 numerous about Tsitkaw, where the long jungle grass of the level plain affords 

 them ample cover, and out of two closely adjoining villages six people had been 

 killed by tigers in as many months. But notwithstanding the prevalence of this 

 animal, and although it was my habit to spend the greater part of the day in 

 the jungle outside Bham6 and Tsitkaw, I never yet came across a tiger, but saw 

 frequent evidences of their presence in their footprints. 



The skins of newly killed animals were frequently brought to me for sale in 

 the Sanda valley, also skulls and the bones of the legs, and these materials enabled 

 me to determine that the tigers of these elevated districts of Western Yunnan 

 differ in no perceptible way from the tiger of India. 



The tiger found in the northern portions of China, as pointed out by Swinhoe,^ 

 is a pale race with few stripes and distinguished by the long character of its fur, 

 which is also more pliable and softer than that of the southern race which, he 

 says, resembles the Bengal tiger, and which is found as far north as Shanghai, and 



• Proc. Zool. Soc. 1864, p. 378. 



