Page:The Zoologist, 4th series, vol 5 (1901).djvu/391

Rh sporting way, without turning round. Dante, however, knows what an Otter looks like, for (Inf. xxii. 36) he compares a baron of Thibault, King of Navarre, when he is being dragged out of the boiling pitch, to one—which is a very good simile.

This completes the list of extraneous animals, unless the Lynx be included; for some would have it that it is the Leopard, or the Caracal, that Dante intends by the Lonza, which he selects as representing worldly pleasure, on the one hand, and Florence, torn by the factions of the Bianchi and Neri, on the other. SetLet [sic] us look at what he says of it (Inf. 1. 32): —

and again (Inf. xvi. 108), "la lonza alia pelle dipinta."

There is no doubt as to what he would set before us—some quick-stealing feline animal with a mottled coat; and probably he is following his master Virgil, who speaks twice of "variæ lynces," which take us back to the Βαλιαὶ λὐγκες of the 'Alcestis.' It is hence that several commentators, going back to the fact that Lynces were the satellites of Bacchus, and that in the classics the idea is associated with India, while at times the word Tiger is used, determine that the word Lynx here must mean either the Leopard or the Felis caracal, which are not European specimens. I cannot see why it should not be the Felis lynx (the Common Lynx), which was to be found in most parts of Southern Europe; an animal with long fur of dull reddish grey, marked upon the sides with oblong spots of reddish brown, which become round and smaller on the limbs; the lower part mottled with black and white. This seems to suit the "pelle maculata" and "dipinta"; while Boccaccio's tale that, when one was being led through the streets of Florence, the boys followed it, and called it a "pard," shows how commonly the two were mistaken. It is not at all impossible that Dante may have come across the beast on some hunting expedition, and that it should have been included in the second division—that of animals with which Dante met in Italy.

Under this head I will first consider those which he met in the chase. The most important of these are the Dogs, of which one knows a good deal from pictures by early masters, and