210 
LION. 
stroying it. When Dr. Thunberg made his second 
journey into Caffraria, in the year 1773? he arrived 
on November 4th at the celebrated Jacobus Bota’s, 
a man who was then eighty-one years of age, and 
had a progeny of one hundred and ninety persons, 
all alive. It was not this circumstance, however, 
says the doctor, singular as it otherwise may be, 
that has given this man so much renown ; but a 
misfortune that befel him in one of his hunting 
expeditions. When he was forty years of age he 
shot a lion in a narrow pass in a wood, who im- 
mediately fell without his observing that there were 
two of them together. The other lion rushed di- 
rectly upon him, before he had time to load his 
piece, and not only wounded him with its sharp 
claws to such a degree that he fainted, but also 
gnawed his left arm and side, and lacerated him in 
such a dreadful manner that he lay on the ground 
apparently dead. The lion left him in this situa- 
tion, to be carried home by his servants. His wife, 
who is noticed as an active woman, immediately 
fetched several vulnerary herbs, which she boiled in 
water ; and, with the decoction, daily washed, fo- 
mented, and bound up his wounds, the good ef- 
fects of which treatment were so evident, that he 
was at length restored to perfect health. His arm, 
however, was so much disabled that he could never 
afterwards handle a musket. 
The lion is said to support hunger for a con- 
siderable length of time, and when he meets with 
food he devours as much as will serve him for two 
