SPOTTING OF LEOPARDS 
whole a silent animal. With an absence of prejudice 
befitting so great a naturalist, Darwin banqueted off 
puma during his travels, and found it excellent. Even 
in this country canine teeth have been recorded from 
what bore the name of jugged hare, and was at least 
a dark-coloured and well-flavoured viand. 
THE LEOPARD 
Panther and leopard, or pard, are really quite syn- 
onymous. But that mighty hunter, the late Sir Samuel 
Baker, proposed to restrict the use of the name 
“panther” to leopards of seven feet and upwards in 
length. The leopard is Asiatic and African in range. 
It is a perfectly typical cat, and, like so many others, 
spotted. The nature of the spots enables the leopard 
to be distinguished at once from the South American 
jaguar, to which it bears not a little resemblance, 
though it is true that the latter, being a more perfectly 
arboreal animal, has shorter legs. The spots in the 
leopard are in the form of rings of black, where best 
developed, the centre of the ring being of the same 
tawny ground colour as the intervals between the 
spots. In the jaguar the ring-like markings enclose 
a central black spot. The spotting has been thought 
by an ingenious speculator in zoology to be a vestige 
of a former armoured condition. He held that the 
spotted carnivora were the immediate descendants of 
creatures with heavy plates imbedded in the skin, like 
an armadillo or a glyptodon. The last trace of these 
was to be seen in the black spotting of to-day. But 
there is really very little to be said for this view. The 
leopard, like so many other animals, shows at times 
the phenomenon known as “melanism.” That is, the 
colouring is so generally darkened as to produce black- 
ness. These black leopards have the reputation of 
greater ferocity than their paler brethren. Melanic 
98 
