If this is not pure malice, never was a writer more persistently unfortunate in little ways. Why remind us here that the species which come nearest to the lion are so hard to distinguish? Why not have said nothing about it? As it is, the case stands thus: we are required to admit close resemblance between the leopard and the tiger, while we are to deny it between the tiger and the lion, in spite of there being no greater outward difference between the first than between the second pair, and in spite of the hurried whisper "_cat with a mane and a long tail_" still haunting our ears. Isidore Geoffroy and his followers may consent to this arrangement, but I hope the majority of my readers will not do so. I went on to the account of the tiger with some interest to see the line which Buffon would take concerning it. I anticipated that we should find cats, pumas, lynxes, &c., to be really very like tigers, and was surprised to learn that the "true" tiger, though certainly not unlike these animals, was still to be distinguished from "many others which had since been called tigers." He is on no account to be confounded with these, in spite of the obvious temptation to confound him. He is "a rare animal, little known to the ancients, and badly described by the moderns." He is a beast "of great ferocity, of terrible swiftness, and surpassing even the proportions of the lion." The effect of the description is that we no longer find the lion standing alone, but with the tiger on a par with him if not above him; but at the same time we fall easy victims to the temptation to confound the tiger with "the many other animals which are also called tigers." A surface stream has swept the members of the cat family in different directions, but a stealthy undercurrent has seized them from beneath, and they are now happily reunited. _Animals of the Old and New World--Changed Geographical Distribution._ Writing upon the animals of the old world,[101] and referring to the humps of the camel and the bison, Buffon shows that very considerable modification may be effected in some animals within even a few generations, but he attributes the effect produced to the direct influence of climate. Buffon concludes his sketch of the animals of the new world by pointing out that the larger animals of the African torrid zone have been hindered by sea and desert from finding their way to America, and by claiming to be the first "even to have suspected" that there was not a single denizen of the torrid zone of one continent which was common also to the other.[102]