Chap. I.] 
LEOPARDS. 
29 
always approached as one in immediate communication 
with the deity ; his attendants address him as " my 
lord," and "your lordship," and exhaust on him the 
whole series of honorific epithets in which their language 
abounds for approaching personages of the most exalted 
rank. At evening and morning, a lamp is lighted before 
him, and invoked with prayers to protect his family from 
the dire calamity which has befallen himself. And after 
his recovery, his former associates refrain from commu- 
nication with him until a ceremony shall have been 
performed by the capua, called aivasara-jpanclema, or 
"the offering of lights for permission," the object of 
which is to entreat permission of the deity to regard 
him as freed from the divine displeasure, with liberty to 
his friends to renew their intercourse as before. 
Major Skinner, who for upwards of forty years has 
had occasionally to live for long periods in the interior* 
occupied in the prosecution of surveys and the con- 
struction of roads, is strongly of opinion that the dis- 
position of the leopard towards man is essentially 
pacific, and that, when discovered, its natural impulse 
is to effect its escape. In illustration of this I insert an 
extract from one of his letters, which describes an ad^ 
venture highly characteristic of this instinctive timi- 
dity : — 
" On the occasion of one of my visits to Adam's Peak, 
in the prosecution of my military reconnoissances of the 
mountain zone, I fixed on a pretty little patena (i. e., 
meadow) in the midst of an extensive and dense forest 
in the southern segment of the Peak Eange, as a 
favourable spot for operations. It would have been 
difficult, after descending from the cone of the peak, to 
have found one's way to this point, in the midst of so 
