THE LIFE OF MAMMALS 
and thence eastward to central India. In general manner of 
life it is a leopard, except that it is little fond of the forest, 
living mainly among rocky, barren hills, and attacking deer, 
antelopes, and the herdsman’s flocks. Occasionally one 
settles down to a raiding life until killed as a public nuisance. 
It does not attack men. Blanford *® declares that its speed in 
pursuit of quarry exceeds that of any other beast of prey, or 
even that of a greyhound. One has been seen to catch within 
four hundred yards a blackbuck that had a fair start. 
The cheeta is principally interesting, however, because for 
ages it has been trained in India to capture game for its masters, 
— it will not do to say it “hunts” for them, since it does nothing 
of the sort. This use of the large cats is of great antiquity. 
When .Elian wrote, in the third century of our era, the natives of India 
knew how to train the black-maned lion of that country for the chase, lead- 
pera ing it in a slip. Marco Polo mentions that the Great Khan 
ntiquity of d 
Sport with of Tartary had not only leopards and lynxes trained to hunt, 
eheetae but tigers, which were taken to the field on cages drawn in 
carts, and chased wild boars, wild cattle, deer, roebucks, and other beasts. 
In the Revue Britannique for October, 1885, will be found a very inter- 
esting article on hunting with the cheeta, written by Baron Dunoyer de Noir- 
ment, high authority on the history of the chase. He traces the progress of this 
sport from the earliest times. The cheeta is figured on Assyrian bas-reliefs in 
the act of seizing an antelope, and is represented on Egyptian monuments, 
1700 B.C., as led in a slip with a very ornamental collar. The Crusaders 
found this kind of sport much in vogue with the Mussulman princes of 
Syria; and a celebrated Arabic writer on hunting and hawking, Sidi 
Mohamed el Mangali,™* enters in great detail upon the mode of taming 
and training caracals and the cheeta (deprivation of food and sleep 
. being the chief means of subjection) as practiced in his day, about 1348 A.D. 
He declares that Persians knew the art best; mentions various local varie- 
ties, including a black one from South Arabia; and says that a leopard 
trained to hunt in concert with a falcon was of inestimable value. 
Tippoo Sahib, the last Sultan of Mysore, was, like most Eastern poten- 
tates, an enthusiastic sportsman, and kept no less than sixteen cheetas. 
When Tippoo was killed at the taking of Seringapatam in 1799, two of these 
were sent to England and were kept at Windsor until they died, and it was 
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