The Helplessness of Old Lions. 9 
occasionally indulge in vegetable food, either as a medicinal 
corrective, or because they have a fancy for a change of diet. 
Thus, they will eat quantities of grass, especially when old, 
possibly from necessity, and Livingstone mentions their feeding 
on water melons, even at a time when game was very abundant 
in the neighbourhood. The paunch of a herbivorous animal, 
too, containing half digested vegetable matter, is often devoured 
before any other part of the carcase is touched. It might 
perhaps be worth while to take these facts into consideration 
in the treatment of caged felide. 
The helplessness of old age renders most animals an easy 
prey to their enemies, but what creature, except man, dares 
attack the tyrant of the forest, even when time has shorn him 
of almost all his vigour? Lording it over all creation, as he 
does when in his prime, the day of retribution for the lion 
comes at length, and with advancing age and stiffening muscles, 
the pangs of hunger must be a daily torture to the once 
powerful beast. Then he sneaks about the villages, content to 
pick up a mangy dog, or dine on offal, or mayhap strike down 
some feeble old man or woman loitering homewards in the dusk. 
But the monarch of the forest may fall even lower than this. 
Decrepitude is apparent in all his frame; his teeth have 
decayed, so that he can neither catch nor tear up a zebra or an 
antelope; his sight and hearing fail him, and the palsied brute— 
quantum mutatus ab illo Hectore—is fain to catch mice and fill 
his belly with grass, until he gradually sinks under the combined 
effects of disease and starvation. 
I am greatly indebted to my friend, Mr. J. T. Nettleship, 
whose Indian experience has rendered him familiar with the 
felide in the wild state, for the admirable drawing—taken from 
one of his life-size oil paintings—which forms the frontispiece 
to this volume. The lioness is intently watching a herd of 
antelopes passing through a thicket, with sight, hearing, and 
smell keenly alive to every movement of the quarry. The 
attitude, preparatory to gathering herself up for the spring, is 
finely expressive of reserved power. Mr. F. Babbage, in en- 
