V2 MAMMALS

bers under the persistent attacks of the hunter and the
gradual spread of cultivation. Forty years ago lions
were so numerous: in the Delhi district that one
sportsman, Colonel Acland Smith, killed fifty of
them ; nowadays they are becoming so rare that in
Kattywar they are being preserved as if they were
partridges. Between the Tigris and the Euphrates
they are still fairly plentiful, and they used to range
into Palestine and Asia Minor, and even, according
to Herodotus, into Thrace and Macedonia, while a
species, Felzs spele@a, so closely allied to / deo as to
be almost indistinguishable from it, roamed in Pre-
Glacial days all over Western Europe, and even into
what is now Britain.

Lions are to be met with all over Africa, but few
are now killed south of the Orange River. In
Mashonaland they still abound. Lord Randolph
Churchill on one occasion saw seven of them at once,
‘trooping and trotting along ahead of us like a lot of
enormous dogs—great yellow objects, offering such a
sight as I had never dreamed of. In Damaraland
Galton ‘at one place put up eight lions; they were
not close together, but within a space about two
hundred yards across, through which we happened to -
drive. It was the largest pack I had seen. Fourteen
is the largest I have ever heard of.’

Lions are not nearly so dangerous to man as is gene-
rally supposed. The last-mentioned explorer remarks
that, at a rendezvous with the natives, he was curious
to know what animals were most fatal to man in that
country. ‘We counted over all the deaths that we
could think of. Buffaloes (though not common here)