40 WILD NEIGHBORS CHAP. 
ard and tiger, it might have remained to this day 
a source of terror in many thinly settled neighbor- 
hoods, such as the Catskill Mountains, which are 
supposed to have been named in reference to it. 
The rocky wilds of northeastern Quebec and New 
Brunswick may shelter a few, and a small number 
of pairs survived in the Adirondacks until towards 
1890, but the State bounty paid after 1871 has- 
tened their extermination. Twenty years ago one 
heard of an occasional panther in the Alleghanies, 
and some probably remain in the swamps along 
the western side of the lower Mississippi, and in 
the Ozarks; but the whole northern-central region 
of the Union has long been free from them. Prac- 
tically, therefore, we may say that the puma has 
disappeared east of the Black Hills and western 
Texas; yet a century has not elapsed since one 
was taken in Westchester County, N.Y., adjoining 
New York City. 
This animal seems never to have been very nu- 
merous — much less so than bears, wolves, or 
lynxes. Nature, indeed, provides against undue 
multiplication of these powerful and predatory 
beasts. No machine with automatic governor, 
however delicate, equals the self-acting influences 
that preserve, in a state of nature, unbroken by 
civilized interferences, the balance of an equal 
chance for all—a true animal socialism. Thus a 
single pair of these destructive and long-lived cats 
seems originally to have occupied alone a certain 
