70 WILD ANIMALS. 



In an article on the Home o£ tlie Jaguar, written by Mr. Felix 

 L. Oswald, describing tbe swampy valley of tlie Rio Hondo that 

 rises towards the " Sierra del Tigre " or " Tiger Mountain," so 

 called from the number of jaguars that infest the jungles and 

 ravines, we read, " Animals, as well as the different races of man- 

 kind, have their favourite homes. . . . The jaguar has been seen 

 in the upper valleys of the Californian Alps, and manages to eke 

 out an existence in the dismal steppes of Southern Patagonia ; 

 but in no other regifln of our large and diversified continent does 

 he seem as thoroughly at home as in "Western Yucatan, in his 

 hunting-grounds on the upper Rio Hondo. The climate, the 

 quantity and quality of the food supply, and even the periodical 

 inundations, seem to suit his tastes exactly ; and the persecution 

 he has undergone elsewhere may enhance the territorial ad- 

 vantages which here more than outweigh the mental superiority 

 of his biped rivals, and make him the monarch of all he surveys 

 from the summit of the Sierra dedicated to his name. . . . 

 Eleven miles above Uxmal, the canon of the Rio Hondo is de- 

 veloped from a ravine which measures hardly twelve feet across 

 by sixty feet deep in its upper extremity, and retains these dimen- 

 sions for nearly half a mile down-hill, where its visible bottom 

 suddenly sinks into a yawning precipice, and only reappears four- 

 teen miles farther down, where the south fork of the river issues 

 from the mountain-gate of a stupendous glen. For a mile or two 

 above the mouth of this glen the water can be heard rushing and 

 foaming between its sunless banks, but farther up all is still, and 

 rocks tumbled over the edge of the abyss, thunder and reverberate 

 in their descent for second after second, till their last faint 

 rumblings seem to echo from the interior of the earth. 



"In these fastnesses of Tartarus the female jaguar whelps her 

 cubs, true children of Chaos and Old Night, as far as the locality 

 of their birth is concerned. Bold hunters who have ascended 

 such ravines from below, or who have lowered themselves at the 

 end of a stout lariat, have succeeded in finding the lair of the 

 wary brute by following the sound of querulous moans which the 

 kittens utter almost incessantly for the first ten days of their 

 existence. Either on the shelf of a projecting rock, or on the 



