162 THE ZOOLOGIST. 
again released, the sitter resuming his seat, and he would at once 
commence to restalk. At last he got too big and too dangerous, 
and we had to chain him at the foot of a tree, in which he spent 
the greater part of his time. I had bought two English Grey- 
hounds of some considerable value. They got loose one night 
and attacked the Panther, who, chained as he was, soon put both 
hors de combat, and they were so mauled that, though by timely 
interference we saved their lives, they were ever afterwards 
useless for coursing. We had a large Sambur, fully three years 
old. In passing under a branch of the tree, where the Panther 
was crouching, the beast sprang down upon it, and would have 
killed it, had not our servants been at hand to rescue the Deer. 
We eventually turned him and a Bear we had, loose on Mole 
Alley Race-course, and speared them. 
Shikaries sitting upon trees and machans have been carried 
off by them; and two Karens travelling through a forest in the 
Tenasserim District got benighted, and erected bamboo platforms 
on the branches of a large tree. During the night, the lower 
man was awakened by a Leopard climbing up the tree; he called 
out to his comrade, who was too sleepy to pay any attention, and 
was seized and carried off. 
It is uncertain the number of cubs a Leopardess brings forth 
at a birth; but achum of mine killed one with no fewer than seven 
young ones. Black Leopards are but a lusus nature. They are 
more abundant in moist climes overrun with sombre forests than 
in more open country, though they are occasionally found here 
and there in open as well as wooded lands. In the dense forests 
of Malaya and Lower Burma Leopards exist principally on the 
Gibbon Apes, as other game is scarce. Nature therefore adapts — 
their colouration to their surroundings. An ordinarily marked — 
Leopard would be too conspicuous, and would die of starvation. 
The fittest—the black—survive, as they are not so easily seen. A 
black Pantheress who mated with an ordinary Leopard had two 
or three litters which showed no signs of being melanoid. In 
Africa the ordinary Leopard, as distinguished from the Panther, 
is most plentiful, and great numbers are killed every year by the 
natives with poisoned arrows. Numbers are caught in traps, and 
Colonel Montagu, of the Commissariat, caught twelve Leopards 
and one small Tiger in a trap in his compound at Shillong. 
