Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/825

Rh teeth little better than daggers of the most terrible kind, hundreds do frequently escape from conflict with a lion, sometimes almost unwounded. Meunier, one of the most illustrious French observers of animal psychology, narrates how a certain man named Botta was once knocked down by a lion, kept in a perilous position for some time, bruised all over, and badly bitten in the arm, fter which the lion went away, leaving the man very seriously but not dangerously wounded. Delagorgue cites a lion hunter who found himself in the same predicament twice within seven years after having fired at a lion. The first time the lion contented himself with fracturing both the hunter's arms; the second time it inflicted six bites and clawed him in several parts of the body, and on neither occasion did it proceed to further reprisals. Another man, Vermaes by name, a farmer living near the source of the Mooi, a tributary of the Tanguela, in Natal, one evening espied a lioness assailing his cattle. Directly he saw her he fired and hit her; but the animal sprang upon him and knocked him down. The man afterward described how he had felt: his ears stunned by the animal's hoarse roars, how he had seen two jaws armed with long white teeth opened wide above him; how he had felt the two sides of his chest being crunched together all the way down; after that, nothing more. He was picked up bleeding from this one bite, after giving which the lioness had departed.

These facts seem to show that the lion is not consciously aware of his power of destroying the life of another living creature. He springs upon his enemy in order to wreak his anger, and bites instinctively, but not to kill him. Hence he bites at random wherever chance offers, without allowing himself to be guided by previous experience, which would have shown him that certain bites given in a certain way may cause death; and as soon as he has satisfied the need he feels of relieving his rage by biting he goes away.

The lion, then, is a dangerous beast, not because he is ferocious in the sense that he enjoys the sensation of successful slaughter—he has not reached the idea of death, and hence can not realize his vast power to inflict it; he is ferocious because he bites when infuriated, and because the bites of an animal so powerfully endowed by Nature are of terrible consequence. Hence it follows that when he strikes his prey so definitely on the neck before devouring it, he does so not with the distinct idea of killing it, but merely because experience has shown him that after having struck it in this particular way he can most easily devour it; and this fact also explains why he does not strike in the same way when he springs upon another creature, not for food, but in a fury of self-defense.