the name of Ista is there applied to an Armenian river, either by an error of the author or of the transcribers.” Nor is Europe the only part of the world from which the form of the Lion has disappeared. Lions are no longer to be found in Egypt, Palestine, or Syria, where they were once evidently far from uncommon. The frequent allusion to the Lion in Scripture, and the various Hebrew terms there used to distinguish the different ages and the sex of the animal, prove a familiarity with the habits of the race. Even in Asia generally, with the exception of some countries between India and Persia, and some districts of Arabia, these magnificent beasts have become comparatively rare; and this is not to be wondered at. To say nothing of the immense draughts on the race for the Roman arena--and they were not inconsiderable, for there were a thousand Lions killed at Rome in the space of forty years--population and civilisation have gradually driven them within narrower limits, and their destruction has been rapidly worked in modern times since firearms have been used against them instead of the bow and the spear. The African Lion is annually retiring before the persecution of man farther and farther from the Cape. Mr. Bennett[8] says of the Lion: “His true country is Africa, in the vast and untrodden wilds of which, from the immense deserts of the North to the trackless forests of the South, he reigns supreme and uncontrolled.” In the sandy deserts of Arabia, in some of the wild districts of Persia, and in the jungles of Guzerat, in India, he maintains a precarious footing; but from the classic soil of Greece, as well as from the whole of Asia Minor, both of which were once exposed to his ravages, he has been utterly dislodged and extirpated. The fearful custom, so common afterwards among the Romans, of having many encaged Lions, “fierce with dark keeping,” to use Bacon’s expression, for judicial as well as sporting purposes, was evidently an old custom in the East; for we learn from the book of Daniel that the kings of Babylon kept a “den of Lions” into which offenders were thrown alive. Judging, however, from the Biblical narrative, the Chaldeans had a far less revolting manner of killing criminals than the Romans, for they seem to have used the Lions simply as executioners; to have cast in the victim, and then to have fastened up the entrance of the den, drawing a decent veil on the horrible scene taking place within. They did not, like the Romans, curry favour with the masses by making the death of their victims into a spectacle, at which all classes had their love of excitement gratified by the sight of men and women torn and mangled and devoured by raging beasts, to the accompaniment of small talk and flirtation.