36 The Naturalist in La Plata. 



the victor ; and this is borne out by the finding 

 of the bodies of bears, which have evidently 

 perished in the struggle. 



How strange that this most cunning, bold, and 

 bloodthirsty of the Feiidse, the persecutor of the 

 jaguar and the scourge of the ruminants in the 

 regions it inhabits, able to kill its prey with the 

 celerity of a rifle bullet, never attacks a human 

 being ! Even the cowardly, carrion-feeding dog 

 will attack a man when it can do so with impunity ; 

 but in places where the puma is the only large 

 beast of prey, it is notorious that it is there per- 

 fectly safe for even a small child to go out and 

 sleep on the plain. At the same time it will not 

 fly from man (though the contrary is always stated 

 in books of Natural History) except in places where 

 it is continually persecuted. Nor is this all : it 

 will not, as a rule, even defend itself against man, 

 although in some rare instances it has been known 

 to do so. 



The mysterious, gentle instinct of this ungentle 

 species, which causes the gauchos of the pampas 

 to name it man's friend — "amigo del cristiano " — 

 has been persistently ignored by all travellers and 

 naturalists who have mentioned the puma. They 

 have thus made it a very incongruous creature, 

 strong enough to kill a horse, yet so cowardly 

 withal that it invariably flies from a human being — 

 even from a sleeping child! Possibly its real re- 

 putation was known to some of those who have 

 spoken about it; if so, they attributed what they 

 heard to the love of the marvellous and the ro- 

 mantic, natural to the non-scientific mind ; or else 



