THE LION 
full possession of its strength and activity might conceivably yield to 
temptation should it get the chance of killing a man when it was suffering 
from hunger, and then resume its normal life as a game-killer. The 
Tsavo man-eaters are said not to have been very old, but they were 
certainly past their prime. Living as they did in a country where game 
was very scarce, and having probably been driven by sheer hunger to 
kill and eat their first man, the temptation offered to their appetites by 
the crowds of coolies and natives collected together in the construction 
camps on the Uganda Railway was too much for them, and caused 
them to take entirely to a diet of human flesh. They were finally killed 
by Colonel Patterson, but not before they had destroyed twenty-eight 
Indian coolies. 
The lion which entered a carriage on the Uganda Railway and killed 
and ate Mr Ryall, and which was subsequently caught alive in a box -trap 
by Mr Costello, was certainly a very old animal, with teeth and claws very 
much worn and broken. 
Very few lions have been actually weighed immediately after death, so 
that the maximum size and weight to which these animals may sometimes 
attain is still an unknown quantity. Mr Roosevelt gives the weight — 
carefully taken with an accurate weighing-machine — of the largest lion 
shot during his expedition through British East Africa in 1910 as 410 lb. 
This lion, he tells us, “was a big old male, still in his prime. Between 
uprights his length was 9 ft. 4 in., and his weight 410 lb., for he was not 
fat.” Curiously enough, a big old male lion which I shot myself at Hartley 
Hills, in Mashonaland, in 1891, and weighed immediately after death on 
a steel -yard scale, also scaled 410 lb. This lion was an old animal, and 
must undoubtedly have weighed a good deal more when he was younger 
and in better condition. I think, therefore, that full-grown lions when 
very fat may often attain a weight of 450 lb., or even 500 lb., and a length 
sometimes from nose to tip of tail between uprights of possibly ten feet.* 
Lion -hunting must be one of the oldest sports in the world, for doubtless 
when the ancient cave lions of Europe — of which the African lion is the 
lineal descendant — took to man-eating, our own palaeolithic ancestors 
had in self-defence to combine and attack them with their flint -headed 
arrows and spears. 
•Since these lines were written, Mr R. B. Woosnam, the Chief Game Warden in British East Africa, has 
recorded the carefully taken weight of “a fine average male lion in good condition," shot by Mr R. J. Stordy, the 
Chief Veterinary Officer of the East Africa Protectorate, as exactly 420 lb. 
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