16 
CARNIVORA. 
THE LION. - 
Le Leon. Felis Leo. 
The superior bodily powers possessed by the lion, 
joined to his carnivorous regimen, and consequent 
predacious habits, while they place him at the head 
of the beasts of prey, make him also the undisputed 
tyrant and universal dread of the plains and forests, 
and point obviously to the situation in which he must 
be placed, in any artificial arrangement of the animal 
kingdom, as the first and most important species of 
the order carnivora. 
Verbal description, or even the best of figures, will 
convey but an inadequate notion of this tremendous 
beast. The rhetorician and the painter alike fail in 
describing and depicting the terrific work of Nature 
exhibited in the lion. Even in a state of confine- 
ment, and with perfect security to the spectator, he 
cannot be contemplated by those, the acuteness of 
whose feeling is not blunted by habit, without a 
lively excitement of the passions. If he be but 
slightly irritated, so as to erect and shake his bushy 
mane, and to exhibit the change of countenance 
which a peculiar mobility of the muscles of the face 
enables him to effect ; the timid shrink back from 
the sight ; the bold are obliged to summon reason, 
the parent of true courage, to their assistance, and 
