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-pandema, 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 Skinnek, 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 : — 



6 6 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 Range, 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 



