94 INITIATIVE IN EVOLUTION 



and he has been shown up as cowardly by nature and mean in 

 his general conduct. It remains for some learned scholar ot 

 whitewash the hysena, as someone has done for Caesar Borgia, 

 and to put him in the place of the lion. But Lydekker does not 

 admit that this disparagement of the lion goes very far. He is 

 the King of Beasts by grandeur of appearance, strength and ferocity. 

 The lion's skin is covered by close fine hair, except in certain 

 seasons in cold climates, and is easily studied. There are three 

 regions where this representative cat has departed from the Primitive 

 mammalian slope of hair, and the figure of a lioness shows two of 

 these, the peculiar downward trend of hair on the muzzle and the 

 whorl on the shoulder. Fig. 37 shows the third, A 0, on the middle 

 of the back as well as the whorls at D. 



Snout of the Cats 



The muzzle of all the cats is very short and broad, and at the 

 level of the orbits shows a peculiar reversal of the hair from the 

 rest of the head, for instead of being like that of a dog in which the 

 hair slopes all the way upwards from the tip of the snout to the 

 rest of the head, it breaks away from this normal type and passes 

 in a uniform close stream to the edge of the wet muzzle. The 

 arrows in Fig. 36 show this change. One asks at once the reason 

 for such an unexpected trend of the hair on a small area, when the 

 carnivores in other groups have a uniform slope towards the head 

 from their more pointed muzzles. The cats have discarded the 

 earlier family pattern and for a reason which does credit to their 

 self-respect. Very few naturalists know, or have described so well 

 the meticulous care which animals take of their coats, as Miss 

 Frances Pitt did in the National Review, where she gave a delightful 

 account of " How Animals Clean Themselves." The toilet of the 

 lion she did not discuss, perhaps for prudential reasons. Her 

 account dealt chiefly with a number of small hairy mammals and 

 lower forms of life. Watch a dog cleaning his coat and you will 

 see the ingenious way in which he pushes his head and body forward 

 as he lies on some rough surface such as grass, or our best drawing- 

 room mat. He can thus clean his snout and other parts, but no 

 cat adopts so rough and ready a method. We know how long and 

 how scrupulously she licks her fur to clean it in the parts she can 

 reach and cleans her head with her paws. But with such a broad 

 snout as she and the larger cats possess she cannot clean the short 

 surface of it in the manner of the dog. So she " dresses " this 

 little surface in a special way of rubbing it from the neighbourhood 

 of her eyes forward with her paws. And so we may assume does 



