CHAP. Ill] INACCURATE OBSERVATION 81 



zebra and antelope, and not molesting the buffalo and 

 domestic cattle, which in other parts of Africa furnish 

 their habitual prey. In some other neighbourhoods, 

 not far distant, our hosts informed us that the jaguars 

 lived almost exclusively on horses and cattle. They 

 also told us that the cougars had the same habits as the 

 jaguars except that they did not prey on such big 

 animals. The cougars on this ranch never molested 

 the foals, a fact which astonished me, as in the Rockies 

 they are the worst enemies of foals. It was interesting 

 to find that my hosts, and the mixed-blood hunters and 

 ranch workers, combined special knowledge of many of 

 the habits of these big cats with a curious ignorance of 

 of other matters concerning them and a readiness to 

 believe fables about them. This was precisely what 

 I had found to be the case with the old-time North 

 American hunters in discussing the puma, bear, and 

 wolf, and with the English and Boer hunters of Africa 

 when they spoke of the lion and rhinoceros. Until the 

 habit of scientific accuracy in observation and record is 

 achieved, and until specimens are preserved and care- 

 fully compared, entirely truthful men, at home in the 

 vidlderness, will whole-heartedly accept, and repeat as 

 matters of gospel faith, theories which split the grizzly 

 and black bears of each locality in the United States, 

 and the lions and black rhinos of South Africa, or the 

 jaguars and pumas of any portion of South America, 

 into several different species, all with widely different 

 habits. They will, moreover, describe these imaginary 

 habits with such sincerity and minuteness that they 

 deceive most listeners ; and the result sometimes is that 

 an otherwise good naturalist will perpetuate these fables, 

 as Hudson did when he wrote of the puma. Hudson 

 was a capital observer and writer when he dealt with 



