134 MAMMALS OF PENNSYLVANIA AND NEW JERSEY. 



and generally number 2, often 3, rarely 4. The male and female do not asso- 

 ciate after the birth of the young, but often hunt together before that season, 

 assisting each other in the destruction of large game. When engrossed in 

 catching deer, or in the excitement of killing or first eating their victim, their 

 innate fear of man vanishes. Godman relates how a pair in Centre Co., Pa., 

 pursued a wounded buck before the hunter could overtake it and were killing 

 it when the hunter arrived on the scene. Though he shot and killed the 

 female, the male continued to throttle the deer and was shot 3 times in fatal 

 parts of the body while facing the hunter on the same spot ; the buck mean- 

 while, having stumbled over it, regained its feet and ran off. When chased by 

 dogs, they sometimes leap directly from the ground to the lower branches of 

 a tree and thus ascend, but if forced to climb a tree whose limbs are out 

 of leaping reach, they go up the trunk precisely as does a cat, by short, cling- 

 ing jumps. The voice of the male panther, So far as I have observed it in the 

 Philadelphia Zoological Garden, is capable of most of the gradations and tones 

 of the domestic cat, and has a great similarity thereto in purring, mewing, 

 caterwauling and spitting notes. Multiply cat-calls by ten and you get the 

 kind of noises that have done more than anything else to give the "American 

 Lion " its reputation for qualities which it does not possess. Roosevelt says 

 that the sounds made by those hunted by him were low growls and snarls 

 with, rarely, a thunderous growl. They make no sounds which could be 

 compared with the roaring of lions, that we have account of. 



Description of species. — Until recently, all of the animals in America styled 

 " Pumas, Cougars, Panthers and Mountain Lions," were classed by naturalists 

 under one scientific name, Felis concolor. As this binomial was given by 

 Linnaeus to a Brazilian specimen, and North American specimens had proved 

 to differ from those of South America in some degree, the modern naturalist 

 became restive. Only the lack of material for comparisons and the tedious 

 searching in the dusty tomes of nomenclature, characteristic of the priority- 

 hunting of to-day, had deterred the hair-splitters from putting forth a few 

 more old and familiar cougars in the role of new species and subspecies. 

 Some of these, alas, must receive old discarded names long languishing on 

 the perennial bosom of synonymy ! 



Dr. Merriam had already described, ere his "Revision of the Pumas" 

 (Proc. Washn. Acad. Sciences, 1901) came forth, a s^tc\t%, F.hippolestes, 

 from Wyoming, and a race F. h. olympus, from the Pacific coast. These he 

 has retained, and has adopted couguar of Kerr as a separate species from 

 the Rocky Mountain hippolestes. With the latter determination I must at 

 present differ, as he has given no evidence that there is any specific difference 

 between the AUeghenian and the Rocky Mountain animals. Owing to his 

 having a fine series of skulls and skin-data of the latter and only two unsexed 

 skulls of the former, he can present no absolute proof that his hypothesis of 



