of the elephant, whilst his mahout, a mere speck, stood a little to
his right. No other living being was visible, but close to the animal,
on the opposite side from Ghassee Ram, lay a small, shapeless object,
which a second glance showed to be the missing man. The elephant, with
his ears raised, seemed to be keeping guard over his victim, and would
probably kill any one who should attempt to remove the body, which lay
within reach of his trunk. Still, this must be done, and at once, for
life might yet be lingering in the shattered frame. I therefore gave
the hurricane lamp to the mahout, and ordered him to swing it up in
the elephant’s face, and call out his name at the same time. Ghassee
Ram, from the long habit of commanding this huge animal, had acquired
some powerful tones. As he swung the lamp, that hung by a large ring,
in the elephant’s face, and cried out ‘Roghanath Gūj, Roghanath Gūj,’
the animal seemed deeply impressed. As the light ascended for the third
time towards his dazzled eyes, I darted from between my two friends,
who stood covering the elephant with their guns, and drew forth the
unfortunate keeper. He was terribly mangled, and quite dead.” This
elephant was semi-delirious, and in that state the wild beast nature,
which had been covered by a thin layer of educational polish, came out
under the stimulus of some passing irritation. His mahout saw the man
struck down, and interfered; but the animal was only restrained by his
voice for a moment, and then completed the murder. He was not wholly
demented, however; for Colonel Barras says, “I could not but be touched
by the affection this huge creature displayed, even in his madness,
towards the only two people he loved,--Ghassee Ram and myself. I fed
him every day from my hand, and he never failed to clank his heavy
chains, and turn round to watch me till I disappeared in my tent on
leaving him.”
It is probable that many persons whose minds are made up on the subject
of elephants, may see nothing in this account but a case of perversion
due to disease, and will pass by the elephant’s evident power of
self-restraint and discrimination as of no significance; contending
that Roghanath Gūj, like all his kind, was naturally benevolent and
amiable. Likewise, that the vagaries belonging to certain forms of
mental alienation, temporary and chronic, are of the most eccentric
and various character, and that this instance proves nothing with
regard to the elephant’s inherent nature. As a mere matter of
reasoning, the objection is valid, and logically it is unanswerable;
but, perhaps, some of those who believe that these brutes possess
virtues of which most men are nearly destitute, will inform the world
why “must”-delirium or actual insanity in an elephant, always takes the
form of homicidal mania.
THE LION
“From the earliest times,” says the writer on this subject in the
“Encyclopædia Britannica,” “few animals have been better known to man
than the lion.” It is precisely because of this knowledge, for the most
part purely imaginary, that the real lion is less known than almost any
of the other great wild beasts. Not so much in this case on account
of the paucity of facts as from a plethora of fiction, his actual
character has very imperfectly come to light.
Since Aristotle there have always been naturalists who contended for
two species of these animals, and sometimes more.
[Illustration: THE LION.
[_From a photograph by Gambier Bolton. Copyright._]]
In Greece, classification was made on the basis of size; in Rome, upon
that of color. With regard to the first, Sir Samuel Baker remarks
that the lions of Cutch and Guzrat are perhaps not so large as their
African congeners; but according to Dr. Jerdon (“Mammals of India”)
measurements show that they are fully equal in this respect. Gérard,
Livingstone, and others notice very discernible local contrasts in
bulk among them in different parts of Africa itself, and it has been
maintained by many that the lion grows smaller as one goes south from
the Atlas. Major Smee has also been largely followed in his opinion
that the Asiatic, or more particularly the Indian, lion is maneless.
Dr. Blyth, however, was able to demonstrate from the specimens in
the Calcutta Museum that this was not the case, and his view of the
accidental character of this deficiency is no doubt the true one.
Frederick Courteney Selous (“A Hunter’s Wanderings in Africa”) paid
particular attention to this feature, and he states that “out of fifty
male lion skins, scarcely two will be found alike in the color or
length of mane”; he adds that, judging from the same facts which those
who multiply natural groups rely upon, “it would be as reasonable to
suppose that there are twenty species as two.”
This is but a hint at those discrepancies which have arisen from
attaching different values to external and secondary characteristics.
Antagonisms of this kind are overabundant, still there is no doubt
that wherever lions now exist, they are specifically the same. There
is but one genus of lion, with a single species, whose members vary in
size, skin-appendages, color, temper, and habits, with the physiography
of those provinces they inhabit, and of their human population, with
breed, age, temperament, special environment, and their personal
experience of men and things.
Sir Samuel Baker (“The Rifle and Hound in Ceylon”) remarks in the
course of his observations upon the Cingalese buffalo that no
individual opinion upon the traits and disposition of an animal “can
be depended upon,” unless its pursuit “has been followed as a sport
by itself.” The results of many hunters’ experiences are, however, on
record, and so far as facts go, we are actually possessed of a more
varied and extensive acquaintance with the species than any individual
contact with it would be likely to give.
There is much that is inadequate and also illusory in Gérard’s
descriptions. Still, he met the formidable adversaries he encountered
in a heroic spirit, and had seen them face to face too often not to be
disabused of many errors. The sultan of the desert as known by him did
not fear man, was not abashed in his presence, and could not be quelled
by his eye. On the contrary, an attempt to stare him out of countenance
was, as Sir Samuel Baker observes, the surest means to provoke an
attack. Gérard’s experience carried him too far. He only knew the lions
of Algeria and Oran, but he thought that these animals were the same
everywhere. Such is not the case. The race is now extinct in great
areas where it was once distributed. No trace of it is left in many
countries of Asia Minor, and it is dying out in Western Asia and India.
In some regions man has exterminated the lion or driven him away, and
there are other districts where this animal has learned that the battle
nearly always goes against him, and where he now has to be forced to
fight. On the other hand, certain tribes cower before lions, and this
does not fail to change the relations they sustain towards mankind.
This imposing animal makes its appearance in art and literature very
early. Frequent mention is made of it in the Cuneiform tablets and
Hebrew Scriptures. In Pentaur’s Egyptian Epic upon the War of Rameses
II. against the Cheta or Hittites, lions are said to have accompanied
the king’s chariot, and fought as the Greek mastiffs (the dogs of
Molossos) did at Marathon, or those of the British during Cæsar’s
invasion. Herodotus (“Polymnia”) states that when Xerxes’ hordes were
moving in the country that lay between the rivers Nestos in Abedra,
and Achelous of Acarnania, the camel trains suffered much loss from
the attacks of these animals. He informs us that their range was
restricted to this district, and expresses his surprise that camels,
being creatures that these lions had never seen and might have been
supposed to shun, were their especial victims. After Herodotus, when
the Greeks began to write about everything that attracted their
attention, much was said in one way or another concerning lions, but
it amounted to no more than the little that can be found in Roman
archives. It really seems as if classic writers left out on purpose
everything that one would have cared most to know. Not even the minute
and laborious scholarship of the sixteenth century, devoted as it
mainly was to the explication of antiquity, has succeeded in extracting
from these records any information which is at all commensurate with
the opportunities afforded for observation in ancient times. The lion
occupied an exceptional position then as now; he was a favorite subject
for poetic allusion, for epigram, and rhetorical flourishes. But his
character was as much a conventional one at that time as it is at
present. This may be also seen in art, where, whether sculptured and
painted, or set in mosaics, he was depicted in what were supposed to
be characteristic attitudes from Persepolis and the rock tablets of
Kaf to the Sea of Darkness, and from the banks of the Orontes to the
cities of Africa. He impressed antiquity as he has done the modern
world, and so far as disposition and personal qualities are concerned,
most of what was known or thought then might have been condensed into
the modern statement of his traits given in the French “_Cyclopédie_”;
namely, that he was “_si fort et si courageux, qu’on l’a appellé le roi
des animaux_.”
What amount of truth there is in this view we shall see; in the
mean time it is natural enough to regret that those who might have
accomplished so much, have in fact done so little. Varro, Columella,
Aulus Gellius, and others wrote on game and hunting, but classic
notices of a _venatio_ in the amphitheatre are as terse and colorless
as entries in a log-book. Marsian boars, or wolves from the Apennines
were the most formidable creatures an ancient Italian could find in his
own country, and Virgil congratulates himself that such was the case.
“_Rabidæ tigres absunt et saeva leonum semina._” But the scribblers in
prose and verse who expatiated upon fish-ponds, nets, gins, snares,
Celtic, Lycaonian, and Umbrian hounds, with all the appliances of petty
sport, where were they while the _Ludi Circenses_ were going on? How
was it that these men, who gossiped about everything, never chatted
with the keepers of that great _Vivarium_ near the Prænestine gate,
where there were often wild beasts enough to stock the menageries of
the modern world? Why did they not tell of the fleets laden with such
cargoes that came to Ostia, interview the men who brought them as they
drank rough Massic together in the taverns under the Janiculum, or
report the talk of those dark satellites who guarded the _vivaria_ of
the Colosseum or theatre of Marcellus?
The reason was this: independently of everything else, a Roman of those
days was satiated with the sight of actual slaughter until all that
now fascinates the attention and enthralls the interest of a reader of
adventures had become insipid. The _bestiarii_, or wild beast fighters,
were a class apart from other gladiators. So far as our meagre supply
of information goes, these men did not meet a royal tiger as a Ghoorka
now does; that is to say, did not trust to perfect nerve, training,
and activity, to avoid the brute’s onset, and slay it by striking at
advantage; they appeared in armor and _actually fought_ with sword or
spear. Considering the style in which lions and tigers combat, one
cannot divine the use made of any defensive panoply, which, so far as
we can judge, would seem to have been more of an encumbrance than an
aid. An iron sword two feet long (for the much-talked-of Iberian steel
was most likely only a good quality of untempered metal) could hardly
have availed a hampered man in a hand-to-hand struggle of this kind,
except in case of accidents that must have been of rare occurrence.
Julius Cæsar’s Thessalian horsemen chased giraffes around the arena
until they were exhausted, and then killed them with a dagger thrust
at the junction of the spine and head; but it is safe to say that no
_bestiarius_ armed with a _venabulum_ went through any performances of
this kind with a black rhinoceros. Yet every formidable animal on earth
perished upon “a Roman holiday.” That is, however, all we know.
It is now the fashion to say that lions are such timid creatures that
they might be expected to do little injury if they got out of their
cages in the presence of a crowd. When, writes Plutarch, the city of
Megara was stormed by Calamus, their keepers or the authorities loosed
those lions kept for the games--“opened their dens, and unchained them
in the streets to stop the enemy’s onslaught. But instead of that they
fell upon the citizens and tore them in such a manner that their very
foes were struck with horror.” Another curious comment upon the timid
and retiring behavior of these animals is found in the fact that while
they were protected in Africa (preserved for the spectacles) by cruel
game laws which deprived people of the natural right of self-defence,
the loss of life in that province was so great that it excited
compassion even in Rome, and finally led to the mitigation of these
statutes by Honorius, and their final abolition during the reign of
Justinian.
Moffat (“Missionary Labors and Scenes in South Africa”) had the
reputation of knowing more about lions than almost any one else, and
it was his opinion that eying them was a very questionable proceeding.
Both he and Andersson (“The Lion and the Elephant”) say that this
experiment may sometimes apparently succeed, but “under ordinary
circumstances” a hungry lion “does not spend any time gazing on the
human eye ... but takes the easiest and most expeditious means of
making a meal of a man.” It is not very often that things so arrange
themselves as to give any one a chance to try what effect can be
produced in this way; still everything that could happen has happened,
and combining what follows with the statements already made, it would
appear that this much-talked-of personal power is a delusion.
“A lion,” writes the Hon. W. H. Drummond (“The Large Game and Natural
History of South and South-east Africa”) “will seldom stand much
bullying. He may and often will get out of your way, nay, even leave
his prey if you approach it, and should you follow him, will perhaps do
so a second time, but that is about the extent of it.” If interference
is pushed further, the lion, “if a male, growls deeply, and makes his
mane bristle up round him; or, if a lioness, crouches down like a
cat, lays her ears back, and shows her teeth, and in most such cases,
when the brute is fairly roused, a charge is inevitable whether you
advance or retreat.” On the other hand, “some lions make a point of
attacking every human being they meet, without provocation or apparent
cause.” This is unusual, but “there are many instances of lions having
evidently attacked a human being from no other cause than surprise or
fear at suddenly finding themselves so close to him.... In the above
cases, utter immobility and coolness will often avert an attack; for
if the animal, judging by your behavior, imagines that you do not want
to hurt it, it will, after trying you for several minutes, and even
making one or two sham charges, often walk away and allow you to do
the same.... Several instances of this have occurred within my own
knowledge. A large native hunting party had gone out and were scattered
among the thorns, when one of my gun-bearers, who had accompanied
it, suddenly found himself face to face with a full-grown male lion,
without a yard between them. He had presence of mind sufficient to
stand perfectly still, without attempting to take one of the spears he
carried in his left hand into the other, and after a couple of minutes
the brute walked away, turning its head round every second to watch him.
“This could not be attributed to the efficacy of the human eye, as the
man afterwards told me that he had not dared to raise his from the
ground. This lion before going far met another native, who raised his
spear, as if to throw it; upon which it instantly sprang upon him, and
inflicted such wounds that he died within half an hour. I have no doubt
that if this man had stood still, he would have been perfectly safe.”
A still more striking example of the fact that lions, unless hungry,
enraged or alarmed, often pass man by is given by Drummond as follows:
“A hunter of mine was following the trail of a herd of buffalo through
some dense thickets, alone, and armed only with a single barrel.
Suddenly a male lion rose out of one of them, and sitting on his
hind quarters, snarled at him; he had hardly seen it when another,
about three-quarters grown, showed itself within a few yards on one
side, while from behind he could hear the low rumbling growl of a
third. Partly turning so as to watch them all, he saw that the latter
was a lioness, and that three cubs not much larger than cats were
following her. He had, unawares, got into the centre of a lion family.
Unfortunately, one of the cubs saw him, and without exhibiting the
least fear, ran up to him; upon which its mother, in terror for her
offspring, rushed up, and, as he afterwards described it, fairly danced
round and round him, springing to within a yard of him, sideways,
backwards, and in every way but on him. Luckily he was a man of iron
nerve, and bred from the cradle in scenes like this; he therefore
remained quiet, taking no more notice of the frantic behavior of the
lioness than if she had not existed; for, as he said, it was a hundred
to one that I did not kill the mother, and, if I had, the other two
would have avenged her.” It ended by her ultimately retiring into the
thicket, and watching him as he cleared out; but there can be no doubt
that any hesitation, nervousness, or involuntary movement on his part
would have been fatal.
In his description of the lion, Buffon (“Histoire Naturelle”) has
delivered a number of opinions based upon imperfect knowledge. This
animal, he says, owes its characteristics to climate alone. Lions only
inhabit tropical countries, and among the denizens of hot latitudes
they are “_le plus fort, le plus fier, le plus terrible de tous_.” On
the Atlas Mountains, where snow sometimes falls, these beasts have
neither the strength, size, courage, nor ferocity of those who roam
the southern plains, and for the same reason, the lion of America,
if it deserves that name, is but an inferior beast. Man has greatly
circumscribed the range of _Felis leo_, and the natural character of
existing varieties has been greatly changed through his inventions.
Formerly lions were bolder than they are at present; still, in the
Sahara and other places, it happens that “_un seul de ses lions du
désert attaque souvent une caravane entière_.” Owing to its brave and
magnanimous character, a lion only takes life when compelled to do
so by hunger. Certain moral qualities may be said to inhere in the
species at large, but there are also individual lions that add to
these endowments of their race the finest personal traits. More than
one species of this genus exists, and an average lion is about twelve
or thirteen feet long. He is less keen of sight, and has not so good
an organ of scent as other beasts of prey, and for this reason lions
make use of jackals in hunting. All animals they pursue live upon the
ground, and in consequence it is not customary with them to climb trees
like the tiger and puma--“_il ne grimpe pas sur les arbres comme le
tigre ou le puma_.” Their attack is always made from an ambush, whence
the victim is sprung upon and struck down; but it is not devoured until
after life is extinct.
All this, it may be repeated, is erroneous. Climate alone does not
form geographical varieties. Species require to be adjusted to the
whole physiography of their respective regions, and to their organic
environments as well. The lion inhabits temperate latitudes where the
weather is often cold, and it is on those parallels which in Africa run
north and south of the equatorial belt, that he attains his highest
development.
With respect to the lion of the Atlas, Major Leveson (“Hunting Grounds
of the Old World”), General Daumas (“Les Chevaux du Sahara”), and
Gérard (“Journal des Chasseurs”) have shown that it is larger than
its congener further south. Buffon’s thirteen feet lions belong to an
earlier geological period than ours; no such specimens of the cat kind
are at present alive, but his tribute to the courage of the king of
beasts is not perhaps altogether undeserved. Of course there is nothing
in his remarks about magnanimity and the like, and as for a single
lion attacking a caravan, the statement is absurd. Lions and troops of
lions are described by many observers--Le Vaillant, Cumming, Oswell,
Harris, Davidson, Kerr--as having forayed upon encampments in various
ways, but there is no authentic account of any incident such as Buffon
relates.
What he says about the animal’s deficiency in sight and scenting
power is not supported in any way by facts. There is nothing in
the creature’s anatomy to warrant such an assertion. Its olfactory
apparatus is well developed, and as it is a beast of prey, and belongs
to a family distinguished for keenness of scent, there is no reason
to think that this function does not correspond with its structure.
Neither is there anything, so far as the writer knows, in the better
class of observations made upon lions, to indicate any deficiency in
this respect. With reference to sight, if Buffon meant more than that
they, as being nocturnal in habit, are at a disadvantage in the sun’s
glare, it was, we must believe, a mistake upon his part. Their organ of
sight is structurally of a high order; it is so placed that the range
of vision is large, and no good authority has disparaged the lion’s
far-sightedness, or the defining power of his eye.
None of the great cats is, however, strictly nocturnal except in places
where they are constantly pursued. Lions frequently stalk or drive
game while the sun is up; they see perfectly well during these hours,
and it is evidently a mistake to give the primary importance commonly
attributed to it to a peculiarity of vision which the _Felidæ_ have in
common with other classes.
Buffon’s opinion of the use to which lions put jackals falls to the
ground before facts. It is an old idea that they, and tigers also,
employ them as scouts; nevertheless it would appear that the true
relation has been overlooked, and that it is the jackal who uses the
lion. When a lion leaves his lair he always roars, and if any jackals
are in the vicinity, the sound attracts them at once; it is like an
invitation to a meal, for these satellites feast upon the offal.
Similarly, as the lion’s majestic form moves with long and soft but
heavy tread through the gloom, every jackal that sights the grim hunter
follows him.
In works on natural history lions are classed among the _educabilia_.
There is, however, a certain ludicrousness in distinguishing this
animal as one that can be taught. So can a flea. Every creature with
a nervous system may be and is instructed in some manner. All living
things so provided learn, though not necessarily through tuition,
nor in all cases consciously. Dr. Maudsley’s remark (“Physiology and
Pathology of the Mind”), that “a spinal cord without memory would be
an idiotic spinal cord,” is full of meaning. Wherever a nervous arc
exists, there is memory and the potentialities of mind. The central
axis is nothing more than an integrated series of such connected arcs
ending in a brain when the animal is sufficiently elevated.
A whelp is born in the spring, or towards the close of winter, a little
sooner or later, as the latitude varies. Before this event the parents
have fixed upon some solitary spot in which to establish themselves.
The mother’s character undergoes a temporary change for the better
during the period of maternity. While the pairing season lasts she
is a shameless wanton, ready at any moment to abandon her mate for a
stronger rival. Desperate combats accompany the lion’s courtship, in
which both parties are frequently killed, and in almost all instances
these are brought on by the lioness, who seems to take a savage
pleasure in provoking such duels.