140 Wild Beasts 



cub is gray, light, and furry. . . . The half-grown one, 

 gray also, but the spots are faintly distinguishable. In the 

 full-grown animal they are perfectly plain, but very dirty 

 and undefined. There is also a peculiar gray hog mane." 

 W. H. Drummond ("Large Game and Natural History of 

 Southern Africa ") also met with the N'gulula, and he, like 

 Andersson, thought at first that it was a small lion, which 

 it greatly resembled " in shape and color." 



We may now turn from the varieties of Felis pardus and 

 their external characteristics, to an investigation of those 

 traits which have become organized in them during the long 

 course of ages in which they have become specialized, 

 physically and mentally, for a predatory life. 



To know what an animal of this kind feeds on, and how 

 it takes its prey, is also to know much about its structure, 

 temper, and disposition. Neither lions nor tigers find the 

 game upon which they subsist in trees, and the latter, 

 therefore, rarely climb, while there is no account of the 

 former having been seen to do so. 



With the panther and leopard this is quite different. 

 There are no climbers more expert than these beasts. As the 

 Panama chief said to the explorer Oxenham, " Everything 

 that has blood in it is food " ; to these animals many things 

 without blood, or at least without red blood, are food, for 

 they eat the larva of insects, insects themselves, and birds' 

 eggs ; likewise many fowls, from the splendid peacock to a 

 common crow, which, as Sir Samuel Baker remarks, " lives 

 by his wits, and is one of the cleverest birds in creation." 

 The panther preys on deer more commonly than any other 

 kind of game, although it destroys reptiles, rodents, etc., 



