10 The Carnivora. 
graving the subject with his accustomed care and skill, has 
well preserved the artist’s touch. 
No Indian sportsman will for a moment allow the tiger to be 
placed in the second rank of the great cats, either as regards 
beauty, power, or ferocity; and many who have only been 
enabled to compare them in a state of captivity will not hesitate 
to give the palm to the striped tyrant of the jungle, notwith- 
standing the reputation which has been attained by his tawny 
rival. The old controversy about size — pretty well thrashed 
out as it has already been— will probably be maintained as 
long as there is a tiger in existence. Sir Joseph Fayrer points 
out that the size varies considerably in both sexes, and an 
error of as much as 12in. may be made by measuring the skin 
alone. Males of full growth may range from 9ft. to 12ft., 
measured along the spine from the tip of the nose to the end 
of the tail; and females from 8ft. to 10ft., perhaps (very rarely). 
11ft., the height in either case varying from 3ft. to 33ft., possibly 
sometimes 4ft. at the shoulder. The average for the male, 
however, is given as 9ft., and for the female 8ft. The tallest 
and longest individuals are not necessarily the heaviest, and 
the tail is sometimes relatively long, so that a beast which 
measured a good length might be a poor specimen, while a short 
bulky animal would be really far larger. Colonel George Bolieau 
says of a male killed by himself : “1 can speak positively as to the 
size of the tiger; his length was well over 12ft. before the skin 
was removed. He was, of course, quite an exceptional size, and 
unequalled, so far as my own experience goes, which extended 
over seventeen years of constant hunting after the species. My 
own experience of the size of tigers is, that in the female the 
size runs from 8ft. to 93ft.—the latter exceptionally large—in 
the male, from 9ft. to 11ft. A well grown adult tiger is seldom 
less than 10ft. in length.” Colonel J. Macdonald found only 
three out of seventy tigers he killed touched 10ft., one of which 
was l0ft. 4in., the heaviest he ever saw weighing 448]b. Among 
180 which Mr. F. B. Simson had seen measured, not one quite 
reached 11ft. By far the largest skins he had seen were from 
