eee THE LIVING ANIMALS OF THE WORLD 
This closes the list of the most cat-like 
animals. The next links in the chain 
are formed by the Civets and Genets, 
creatures with more or less retractile 
claws, and long, bushy tails; the still 
less cat-like Binturong, a creature with 
a prehensile tail; and the Mongooses 
and Ichneumons, more and more nearly 
resembling the weasel tribe. 
THE LION 
RECENT intrusions for railways, 
sport, discovery, and war into Central 
and East Africa have opened up new 
lion countries, and confirmed, in the most 
striking manner, the stories of the power, 
the prowess, and the dreadful destruc; 
tiveness to man and beast of this king 
of the Carnivora. At present it is found 
in Persia, on the same rivers where 
Nimrod and the Assyrian kings made its 
| 
pursuit their royal sport; in Gujerat, 
hols by York & Son] = "Notting Hill where it is nearly extinct, though in 
LIONESS AROUSED General Price’s work on Indian game 
The pose of the animal here shows attention, but not anger or fear written before the middle of the last 
century it is stated that a cavalry officer 
killed eighty lions in three years; and in Africa, from Algeria to the Bechuana country. It 
is especially common in Somaliland, where the modern lion-hunter mainly seeks his sport. 
On the Uganda Railway, from Mombasa to Lake Victoria, lions are very numerous and 
dangerous. In Rhodesia and the Northern Transvaal they have killed hunters, railway officials, 
and even our soldiers near Komati Poort. It has been found that whole tracts of country are 
still often deserted by their inhabitants from fear of lions, and that the accounts of their ravages 
contained in the Old Testament, telling how Samaria was almost deserted a second time from 
this cause, might be paralleled to-day. 
THE Arrican Lion 
BY F. C, SELOUS 
When, in the latter half of the seventeenth century, Europeans first settled at the Cape 
of Good Hope, the lion’s roar was probably to be heard almost nightly on the slopes of Table 
Mountain, since a quaint entry in the Diary of Van Riebeck, the first Dutch governor of the 
Cape, runs thus: “ This night the lions roared as if they would take the fort by storm ”—the said 
fort being situated on the site of the city now known as Cape Town. 
At that date there can be little doubt that, excepting in the waterless deserts and the dense 
equatorial forests, lions roamed over the whole of the vast continent of Africa from Cape Agulhas 
to the very shore of the Mediterranean Sea; nor was their range very seriously curtailed until 
the spread of European settlements in North and South Africa, and the acquisition of firearms 
by the aboriginal inhabitants of many parts of the country, during the latter half of the nineteenth 
century, steadily denuded large areas of all wild game, 
As the game vanished, the lions disappeared too; for although at first they preyed to a 
large extent on the domestic flocks and herds which gradually replaced the wild denizens of the 
