In the end of 1891 I shot a very large lion at Hartley Hills in Mashonaland, and weighed and measured it carefully, as it was killed within three hundred yards of the settlement. This animal, which was a remarkably fine specimen of a wild lion, was in excellent condition, its whole belly being covered with a layer of fat quite half an inch in thickness; it was also a very large animal, as its measurements will show, and I was much surprised to find that its weight was not greater than it proved to be. As the scale on which I weighed it only registered a weight of 220 lbs., I had to skin and cut the lion up, and weigh him by instalments, and the aggregate of the weights was 408 lbs. As a good deal of blood was lost when his head was cut off, I will add two pounds to this figure, and say that this lion’s dead weight was not less than 410 lbs. I was much disappointed with this lion, as I expected him to weigh 500 lbs. He was an old animal, and might have weighed more when he was a few years younger, as in spite of being fat and well fed, I don’t think his quarters were so rounded and muscular as they might have been. The measurements of his skull--which is now in the collection of the Natural History Museum at South Kensington--are identical with those of the skull of the largest lion shot by Colonel Arthur Paget in Somaliland, as given in Mr. Ward’s book of game measurements; the weight of the skull is 5½ lbs., or ½ lb. in excess of the weight of the very large skull of a lion shot by Mr. Geddes in Eastern Africa, the measurements of which are recorded in the same book. I took the extreme length and the standing height of this lion very carefully; taking the distance with a tape line between pegs driven in firstly at the point of the nose and the tip of the tail, and secondly at the top of the shoulder-blade and the ball of the forefoot, the limb being held straight the while. These measurements give his extreme length in a straight line as he lay dead as 9 ft. 11 ins., and his vertical standing height to the top of the shoulder-blade as 3 ft. 8 ins. The height to the top of the mane, however, with which his shoulders were thickly covered and which was his apparent standing height, was exactly 4 ft. When the skin of this lion was pegged out on the ground it measured 11 ft. 9 ins. in extreme length from nose to tip of tail.