The hunting of wild beasts as ferocious as those that infested the mountains of Asia is a very dangerous amusement even at the present day, notwithstanding the advantage which the huntsman derives from the use of gunpowder, and rifled barrels, and fulminating bullets. But in those days, when the huntsman had no better weapons than bows and arrows, javelins, and spears, the undertaking was dangerous in the extreme. An African lion of full size used to be considered as a match for _forty_ men in the days when only ordinary weapons were used against him, and it was considered almost hopeless to attack him with less than that number. And even with that number to waylay and assail him he was not usually conquered until he had killed or disabled two or three of his foes. Now, however, with the terrible artillery invented in modern times, a single man, if he has the requisite courage, coolness, and steadiness of nerve, is a match for such a lion. The weapon used is a double-barreled carabine, both barrels being _rifled_, that is, provided with spiral grooves within, that operate to give the bullets a rotary motion as they issue from the muzzle, by which they bore their way through the air, as it were, to their destination, with a surprising directness and precision. The bullets discharged by these carabines are not balls, but cylinders, pointed with a cone at the forward end. They are hollow, and are filled with a fulminating composition which is capable of exploding with a force vastly greater than that of gunpowder. The conical point at the end is made separate from the body of the cylinder, and slides into it by a sort of shank, which, when the bullet strikes the body of the lion or other wild beast, acts like a sort of percussion cap to explode the fulminating powder, and thus the instant that the missile enters the animal's body it bursts with a terrible explosion, and scatters the iron fragments of the cylinder among his vitals. Thus, while an ordinary musket ball might lodge in his flesh, or even pass entirely through some parts of his body, without producing any other effect than to arouse him to a phrensy, and redouble the force with which he would spring upon his foe, the bursting of one of these fulminating bullets almost any where within his body brings him down in an instant, and leaves him writhing and rolling upon the ground in the agonies of death. On the Boulevard des Italiens, in Paris, is the manufactory of Devisme, who makes these carabines for the lion-hunters of Algiers. Promenaders, in passing by his windows, stop to look at specimens of these bullets exhibited there. They are of various sizes, adapted to barrels of different bores. Some are entire; others are rent and torn in pieces, having been fired into a bank of earth, that they might burst there as they would do in the body of a wild beast, and then be recovered and preserved to show the effect of the explosion.