The Ptima, or Lion of America. 53 



no foundation for stories of this character, it is 

 really a very wonderful coincidence that they should 

 be met with in countries so widely separated as 

 Patagonia and Central America. Pumas, doubtless, 

 are scarce in Guatemala; and, as in other places 

 where they have met with nothing but persecution 

 from man, they are shy of him ; but had this adven- 

 ture occurred on the pampas, where they are better 

 known, the person concerned in it would not have 

 said that the puma played with him as a cat with 

 a mouse, bat rather as a tame cat plays with a 

 child ; nor, probably, would he have been terrified 

 into imagining that the animal, even after its 

 caresses had met with so rough a return, was about 

 to spring on him. 



In Clavigero's History of Loiver California, it 

 is related that a very extraordinary state of things 

 was discovered to exist in that country by the first 

 missionaries who settled there at the end of the 

 seventeenth century, and which was actually owing 

 to the pumas. The author says that there were no 

 bears or tigers (jaguars) ; these had most probably 

 been driven out by their old enemies; but the 

 pumas had increased to a prodigious extent, so that 

 the whole peninsula was overrun by them; and 

 this was owing to the superstitious regard in which 

 they were held by the natives, who not only did not 

 kill them, but never ventured to disturb them in. any 

 way. The Indians were actually to some extent 

 dependent on the puma's success in hunting for 

 their subsistence ; they watched the movements of 

 the vultures in order to discover the spot in which 

 the remains of any animal it had captured had been 



