[W]There is a species of lynx which is called the lion’s purveyor.
[W]There is a species of lynx which is called the lion’s purveyor.
This superiority of numbers, and industry in man, which has subdued the lion, serves also to enervate and discourage him, forhe is brave only in proportion to the success of his encounters. In the vast desarts of Zaara, in the burning sands which separate Mauritania and Negro-land, and in all the desarts of Asia and Africa, where man has disdained to fix his habitation, lions are still numerous and preserve their natural force and courage. Accustomed to measure their strength with every animal they meet, the habit of conquering renders them intrepid and terrible. Having never experienced the power of man, they have no apprehension of him, but boldly face and hold him in defiance. Wounds enrage, without repressing their ardour; they are not daunted even by the appearance of numbers. A single lion of the desart often attacks a whole caravan, and if, after an obstinate engagement, he finds himself overpowered, instead of flying, he retreats fighting, and faces the enemy to the last. On the contrary, those lions which inhabit the peopled countries of Morocco, or India, having become acquainted with man, and experienced the superiority of his arms, have lost their native courage to such a degree, that they are to be scared away with a shout, and seldom attack any but the unresisting flocks and herds, which even women and children are sufficient to protect against them.
This alteration, this amelioration in the dispositionof the lion, proves that he might be tamed to a certain degree, and admit of a species of education. We read in history of lions being yoked to triumphal cars, led forth to the field of battle, or let loose to the chace, and that faithful to their master, they never exerted their strength or courage but against his enemies. Certain it is that the lion when taken young, and bred up with domestic animals, becomes familiar and sports innocently among them; that he will even be caressing to his master, and that if his natural ferocity returns, he seldom exercises it against his benefactor. As his passions are strong, and his appetites vehement, we ought not to presume that the impressions of education will always overbalance them; and therefore it would be dangerous to suffer him to remain too long without food, or wantonly to persist in irritating or tormenting him. He is not only enraged by bad treatment, but remembers it and meditates revenge; in the same manner he also remembers benefits and endeavours to shew his gratitude for them. In support of this we might recapitulate a number of facts, in which however there is probably much exaggeration; but it is sufficient that they prove his anger is noble, his courage magnanimous, and his disposition grateful and susceptible of impression. He has often beenseen to despise contemptible enemies, and to pardon their insults when it was in his power to punish them. When in confinement he appears gentle, will caress the hand that feeds him, and will sometimes spare the lives of those animals which are thrown to him for prey; he will even live peaceably with them, spare them part of his subsistence, and has even been known to want food himself rather than be the means of depriving them of that life which his generosity had spared. The lion cannot be said to be cruel, since he acts from necessity and never kills more than he consumes; while the tiger, the wolf, and all the inferior species, such as the fox, marten, polecat, ferret, &c. kill without remorse, and seem rather to satisfy their malignity than their hunger.
The outward form of the lion speaks the superiority of his internal qualities. His figure is striking and grand; his look confident and bold; his gait stately, and his voice tremendous. His bulk is not overgrown like that of the elephant, or the rhinoceros; nor is his shape clumsy like the hippopotamus, or the ox. He is in every respect compact and well-proportioned; a perfect model of strength joined with agility. He is muscular, bold, and neither charged with fat nor unnecessary flesh. Hemanifests his muscular power by the ease with which he makes prodigious bounds and leaps; by the strong and swift movements of his tail, which is alone sufficient to strike a man to the earth; by the facility with which he moves the skin of his face, and particularly that of his forehead, which adds greatly to the expressions of fury in his countenance; and, lastly, by the power he has of moving the hair of his mane, which not only bristles up but is agitated on all sides when he is enraged.
To these eminent qualities the lion joins all the dignity of his species. By dignity of species I mean those whose nature is permanent, invariable, and not subject to degradation. In those animals to which this singular advantage belongs, the characteristics are so strongly marked, that they cannot be mistaken nor confounded with any other species. In man, the noblest being of the creation, the species is sole and entire, because all the individuals of it, of whatever race, climate, or complexion, may intermix and produce together; and because it cannot be said that any animal approaches to man in any natural degree. The horse is less noble considered as a species than as an individual, since the neighbouring one of the ass is so near, that one of each species willproduce animals which Nature reprobates as bastards, unworthy of either race, and renders incapable of perpetuating either species from whence they sprung, but which in itself exhibiting a mixture of both, proves, beyond a doubt, their close affinity. The species of the dog is perhaps less noble, because he seems to be allied to that of the wolf, the fox, and jackall, who may all be considered as degenerate branches of the same family. In descending by degrees to the inferior species, such as the rabbit, weasel, rat, &c. we shall find that each of them has such a number of collateral branches that we cannot trace the original stock; and, lastly, in the tribes of insects, each species is accompanied with such a number of approximate ones that we are obliged to consider them as belonging to a certain genera. This is the only use of what is calledmethodin Natural History, which ought never to be employed unless in the difficult enumerations of small objects, as it becomes useless and ridiculous when treating of beings of the first rank. To class man with the monkey, or to say that a lion is a cat with a long mane and tail, is rather to degrade and disfigure Nature than to describe and denominate her works. The species of the lion,therefore is one of the most noble since it is most entire, and cannot be confounded with those of the tiger, leopard, ounce, &c. and since those species, which appear to be the least remote from the lion, are so little distinct from each other, as to have been perpetually mistaken and confounded by travellers and nomenclators.
The largest lions are about eight or nine feet in length, from the snout to the tail, which is four feet long, and are between four and five feet high. Those of the small size are about five feet and a half long, three feet and a half high, and their tail rather more than three feet long. In all her dimensions the lioness is about one fourth less than the lion. Aristotle divides lions into the greater and smaller, and the latter, he says, are short in proportion, have their hair more frizzled, and are less courageous than the former. He adds, that in general all lions are yellow. The first of these assertions appears doubtful, since no traveller has mentioned lions with frizzled hair; some authors, indeed, who, in other respects do not merit entire confidence, speak of a tiger with curled hair found at the Cape of Good Hope; but almost all testimonies agree as to the colour of the lion, which is uniformly yellow on the back and within on the sides and belly. Ælian and Opian have asserted, that in Ethiopia the lions are as black as the men; that in India there are some white and others spotted and striped with red, black, and blue; but this is not confirmed by any authentic testimony, for Marco Polo the Venetian, does not speak of these striped and spotted lions as if he had seen them, and Gesner observes that he only mentions them on the authority of Ælian. It appears on the contrary, that there are few or no varieties in these species; that the lions of Asia and Africa perfectly resemble each other, and that those of the plains differ less in colour from those which dwell in the mountains than in size.
Engraved for Barr’s Buffon.
FIG. 99.Lion.
FIG. 100.Lioness.
The lion (fig. 99.) is furnished with a mane, or rather long hair, which covers all his fore-parts, and becomes longer as he advances in age; but the lioness, (fig. 100.) however old, is without this appendage. The American animal, which the natives of Peru call Puma, and the Europeans Lion, has no mane, and is smaller, weaker, and more cowardly, than the real lion. It is not impossible that the mildness of the climate in South America might have such influence on the nature of the lion as to strip him of his mane, reduce hissize, and repress his courage; but it appears absolutely impossible that this animal, which inhabits the tropical regions only, and to whom Nature, to all appearance, has shut up every avenue to the north, should pass from the southern part of Asia or Africa into America, those continents being divided towards the south by immense seas. From this circumstance it is probable that the puma is not the lion, deriving its origin from those of the old continent and since degenerated, but that he is an animal peculiar to America, like other animals found on the new continent.
When the Europeans first discovered America, the quadrupeds, birds, fishes, insects, plants, and almost every thing appeared to be different from what they had seen before. Of this new world it was therefore necessary to denominate the principal objects. As the names given by the natives were for the most part barbarous and difficult to pronounce or remember, names were borrowed from the European languages, especially from the Spanish and Portugueze. In this dearth of denominations, a small affinity in external appearance, size, or figure, was sufficient to attribute to unknown objects the names of those that were familiar. Hence the doubt, perplexity, and confusion which has considerably increased, since, at thesame time that the productions of the new continent were receiving the denominations of those of the old one, plants and animals peculiar to the latter were transporting there in abundance. To remove this obscurity, and to avoid falling into perpetual errors, it is therefore necessary to distinguish carefully what belongs to the one continent from what belongs to the other. Of this distinction I shall shew the necessity in the next article, where I shall enumerate not only the animals which are natives of America, but those which have been carried thither.
M. de la Condamine, whose testimony deserves our full confidence, says expressly, that he does not know whether the American animal which the Spaniards call Lion, and the natives of Quito, Puma, deserves the name of Lion; he adds, that it is much smaller than the African lion, and that the male has no mane. Frezier also says, that the animals called lions in Peru are very different from those of Africa; that they avoid the sight of man, and commit no havock but among the cattle; and he further remarks that their heads bear a strong resemblance to the heads of both the wolf and the tiger, and have tails shorter than that of either. In more ancient relations, we are told that the lions of America by no means resemblethose of Africa; that they have neither their size, nor fierceness, nor colour; that they are neither red, nor yellow, nor grey; that they have no mane, and that they have a custom of climbing up trees. Differing, then, from the lion in size, colour, form of the head, length of the tail, want of the mane, and lastly, in natural habits, no longer ought the Puma of America to be confounded with the real lion of Africa or Asia.
Though this noble animal inhabits only the hottest regions, yet he will live, and, with care, might even breed in temperate ones. Gesner mentions that lions were brought forth in the menagerie of Florence; and Willoughby tells us, that at Naples, a lioness which had been confined with a lion, produced five whelps at one litter. Such examples are rare, but if true, they prove that lions are not absolutely averse to mild climates. At present there are none of them in the southern parts of Europe; so early as the days of Homer, there were no lions in Peloponnesus, yet they existed in Thrace, Macedonia, and Thessaly, in the time of Aristotle. It is, therefore, evident that in all ages they have given the preference to the hottest climates; that they seldom resided in temperate ones, and never in the frozen regions of the north. The naturalists above quoted,though they mention lions being brought forth in Florence and Naples, are silent as to the time of gestation in the lioness, the size of the young, when whelped, and the degrees of their growth. Ælian says she goes only two months, while Philostratus and Edward Wotten affirm it to be six. I think the latter opinion is nearest the truth, because the lion is an animal of great magnitude, and in general the time of gestation is longer among the large than the small species. Thus it is also with the growth of the body. Both ancients and moderns allow that the new-born lion is not bigger than the weasel, that is from six to seven inches long; if so, several years must elapse before he can increase to eight or nine feet. It is also said that they cannot walk before they are two months old. But, without giving entire credit to these assertions, we may with probability presume, from the largeness of the size, that he is three or four years in acquiring his full growth, and that he consequently lives to about the age of twenty-five. The Sieur de St. Martin, master of the bull-fights at Paris, who willingly communicated to me the observations he had made upon the lions which he reared, assured me that he has kept lions for fifteen or sixteen years, and that he does not believe they live above the age of twenty or twenty-two.But it must be evident the want of exercise, constraint, and irksomeness of situation to those which are in confinement, must impair health and shorten life.
In two different parts of his treatise on animals, Aristotle states that the lioness produces five or six whelps at her first litter, four or five at the second, three or four at the third, two or three at the fourth, and one or two at the fifth, and after which she becomes barren. This assertion is ungrounded, since in all animals the first and last litters are always the least numerous. This philosopher erred also, as well as all the naturalists that came after him, in maintaining that the lioness had but two nipples, it being a certain and well known fact that she has four, as may be known by simple inspection. He likewise asserts that the lion, bear, and fox, are unformed at their birth; but it is now known that these animals are brought forth as perfect as any other, and that their members are distinct and developed. He says too that the lions copulate in a backward disposition; but from a bare inspection it is demonstrable that they engender in the same manner as other quadrupeds. I have noticed these errors in Aristotle minutely, as the authority of such a great man has misled all authors who have since given the history ofanimals. His assertion also, that the neck of the lion contains but one rigid and inflexible bone, has been contradicted by experience; for in all quadrupeds, without exception, and even in man, the neck is composed of seven vertebræ; and it is also another certain fact, that in general, carnivorous animals have a much shorter neck than granivorous, and especially than the ruminating ones. It is also stated by Aristotle, that the bones of lions have neither cavity nor marrow; that they are as hard as flint, and possess the property of striking fire by friction; but such errors ought not to have been repeated by Kolbe, nor handed down to posterity, since even in the days of Aristotle they were ridiculed by Epicurus.
The lion is particularly furious when rouzed by love. A female when in season will have eight or ten males in her train, who fight most bloody battles, till one of them becomes victorious over the rest. She brings forth in spring, and does not produce more than once a year, which also proves that she is employed for some months in tending and suckling her young, and consequently the time required for their first growth, while they are in need of the assistance of their dam, must at least be some months. In this animal all the passions, even of the most gentle kind, are in excess.The attachment of the lioness to her young is astonishingly great; though naturally less strong and courageous than the lion, she becomes terrible when she has young. She then makes her incursions without fear; attacks indiscriminately men and animals, destroys without distinction, loads herself with the spoil, and carries it home to her whelps, whom she accustoms betimes to blood and slaughter. She usually brings forth in the most retired and inaccessible places, and when afraid of having her retreat discovered, she hides her tracks by traversing back the ground, or brushing them out with her tail. She sometimes also, when her apprehensions are great, transports them to a different place, and if obstructed, she defends them with a determined fury, and fights to the last extremity.
It is asserted that the lion is not possessed of either the sense of smelling or seeing in such perfection as most other animals of prey; a strong light incommodes him, so that he seldom goes abroad in the middle of the day, but commits all his ravages in the night; and when a fire is kindled near a herd, he never approaches them. His smell is also so faulty, that he hunts by the eye only. A species of lynx, which has a piercing eye and acute smell, has indeed procured the name of the lion’sguide, or purveyor, and it is said that he always accompanies or precedes the lion, to direct him to his prey. This is a small weak animal, which sometimes follows the lion, though he would most probably avoid him, did he not frequently come in for a share of that spoil which the lion leaves.
The lion, when hungry, boldly attacks all animals that come in his way; but as he is very formidable, and they all seek to avoid him, he is often obliged to conceal himself for an opportunity of taking them by surprise. This he does by couching upon his belly in some thicket, where he patiently waits the approach of his prey, and which he springs at with such force as often to seize it the first bound; but if in the end his prey escapes, he stands motionless, and seems hurt at the disappointment. In the desarts and forests gazelles and monkeys are his common food; the latter, however, he only takes when upon the ground, as he cannot climb trees like the tiger or puma. He devours as much at once as will serve him for two or three days. His teeth are so strong that he easily breaks the bones and swallows them with the flesh. He is said to be capable of supporting hunger for a long time, but from the heat of his temperament he is less patient of thirst; he drinks as often ashe can meet with water, which he laps like a dog, but with his tongue bent downwards. He requires about fifteen pounds of raw flesh every day; he prefers that of living animals, particularly of those he kills himself; he seldom devours putrid carcases, and chooses rather to hunt for fresh spoil than to return to what he had left on a former day. Though he usually feeds upon fresh provisions his breath is very offensive, and his urine insupportable.
The roaring of the lion is so loud, that when uttered in the desarts by night, and re-echoed by the mountains, it resembles thunder. This roar is his natural note, for when enraged he has a short and quickly reiterated growl; but the roar is a long, deep, hollow cry, which he sends forth five or six times a day, or oftener before rain. His cry of anger is much louder, and still more terrible. He then beats his sides and the earth with his tail, erects his mane, puts the skin of his face, and eyebrows, in motion, shews his tremendous teeth, thrusts out his tongue, which is covered with such sharp hard points, that it is alone sufficient to flay and chew the food without the aid of teeth or nails. He is much stronger in the head, jaws, and fore-legs, than in any of his hind parts. He sees better in the night than by day,and though his sleep is short, and he is easily awakened, yet there is no foundation for the assertion that he sleeps with his eyes open.
The usual pace of the lion is bold, solemn, and slow, though always oblique. When in chase he rather bounds than runs, and his motions are so precipitate, that he cannot stop suddenly, but generally surpasses his intention. When he darts on his prey he leaps the distance of twelve or fifteen feet, seizes it with his fore-feet, tears it with his paws, and then devours it with his teeth. While young and active he lives by the chace, and seldom quits the desarts or the forests, where he finds a sufficiency of wild animals for his purpose; but when he grows old, heavy, and less qualified for exercise, he approaches frequented places, and becomes a more dangerous enemy to man and domestic animals. It is observed, however, that when he sees men and animals together, he attacks the latter, and never the former, unless he is struck; in which case, always distinguishing from whom the blow came, he quits his prey to take revenge for the injury. He is said to prefer the flesh of the camel to that of any other animal; he is also exceedingly fond of young elephants, which, from their inability to resist until their tusks are grown, he easily dispatches, when unprotectedby their mothers, nor are there any animals able to resist the lion but the elephant, rhinoceros, tiger, and hippopotamus.
However powerful this animal may be it is not uncommon for large dogs, supported by men on horseback, to chace, dislodge, and force him to retire; but it is necessary for both dogs and horses to have been well disciplined, as animals tremble and fly at the very smell of the lion. Though his skin is firm and compact it is not proof against a ball, or even a javelin; yet he is seldom dispatched with one blow. He is often taken like wolves, by slightly covering a pit, and fastening a live animal over it. When thus entrapped all his fury subsides, and if advantage is taken of the first moments of his surprise and shame, he may be chained, muzzled, and conducted any where without resistance.
The flesh of the lion is of a strong and disagreeable flavour, yet the Negroes and Indians do not dislike it, and frequently make it part of their food. The skin, formerly the tunic of heroes, serves these people for a mantle; they likewise preserve the grease, which is of a penetrating quality, and is of some use in medicine.
END OF THE SIXTH VOLUME.
T. Gillet, Printer, Wild-court.
Transcriber NoteAll obvious typographical errors were corrected. Where several variant spellings were used, the most prevalent version was use to standardize them. All illustration headers were standardized to display “Engraved for Barr’s Buffon.” above each group and the captions were also standardized. Where paragraphs were split by illustrations, they were rejoined. To match the other volumes in this series, the list for the placement of images was positioned after the Table of Contents.
Transcriber Note
All obvious typographical errors were corrected. Where several variant spellings were used, the most prevalent version was use to standardize them. All illustration headers were standardized to display “Engraved for Barr’s Buffon.” above each group and the captions were also standardized. Where paragraphs were split by illustrations, they were rejoined. To match the other volumes in this series, the list for the placement of images was positioned after the Table of Contents.