124 Wild Beasts 



throw it over his shoulders, and leap a fence four feet 

 high." Leveson says he leaps the stockade of a kraal 

 whose palisades are six feet above the ground, with a 

 steer in his jaws; and Sparman declares that he saw 

 a lion carry off a heifer in his mouth, " as a cat would a 

 rat." Drummond's lions sprang over thorn fences of an 

 indefinite height, carrying their human victims ; Gerard's 

 made no difficulty about clearing the enclosures of Arab 

 douars, while weighted with cattle. Montgomery Martin 

 knew them to bear away horses and cows under like cir- 

 cumstances, and quite as many and as good authorities 

 protest that all this is nonsense, and that they never did, 

 and could not do, anything of the kind. 



How much intellect this species possesses, and to what 

 extent it can be cultivated, remains almost unknown. 

 Their organization makes them subtle, fierce, and some- 

 times passionate beyond the limits of self-control, but they 

 are, no doubt, capable of affection, and certainly exhibit 

 marked preferences and dislikes. Apart from the instruc- 

 tion lions receive from their parents, — chiefly the mother, 

 — and independently of anything which association may do 

 for them, all are to a great degree self-taught ; each one 

 according to its capacity, to the extent of its opportuni- 

 ties, and correspondently with the character of its own 

 mind. They design and carry out their conceptions, they 

 imagine, and act the scenes suggested by fancy, they 

 remember and combine their experiences. 



Lions are not hunted with elephants in Africa. Dutch 

 settlers in the southern part of this continent use horses, 

 but only ride up within shooting distance, dismount, wheel 



