The Tiger 217 



this happening." General W. C. Andersson shot a tiger 

 in Kandeish, within whose body he found the recently 

 ingested remains of another, whose head and paws were 

 lying close by in the jungle. General Blake also discov- 

 ered, near Rungiah in Assam, the partially devoured 

 body of a tiger that had been killed by one of its own 

 kind. 



Except incidentally, technical details bearing upon 

 character have not been mentioned ; the tiger's size, how- 

 ever, has no doubt a marked influence upon his mental 

 traits. Looking upon a trail that goes straight towards 

 the water, which other creatures approach so differently, 

 one sees how the animal that left those footprints — nearly 

 square in the male, oval in case of a tigress — felt no fear 

 of any adversary, and therefore must have been of con- 

 siderable bulk.j Not only the best authorities, so far as 

 formal zoology is concerned, but almost every one who has 

 devoted special attention to this subject, gives the length 

 of an average tiger, when fully developed, at about nine 

 feet six inches from tip to tip. The female is quite twelve 

 inches shorter. Many writers, however, admit the existence 

 of tigers ten feet long, and no one is in a position to deny 

 that some may attain to that length. But when a writer, 

 like Sir Joseph Fayrer (" The Royal Tiger of Bengal ") says 

 that he has "measured their bodies as they lay dead on the 

 spot where they had fallen," and found them to be " more 

 than eleven feet from the nose to the end of the tail," 

 there is nothing to be replied, except that, very few 

 persons have been so fortunate as to see the like. There 

 was once, indeed, a tiger-slayer who used to shoot speci- 



