Lion’s Back. The strange pattern of reversed hair (Fig. 37) is much the most notable of the three peculiarities found on the lion’s skin. It consists of a whorl (A) lying over the lumbar region in the middle line which expands into a very broad feathering (B) and terminates in a crest (C) a short distance behind the level of the shoulders. This is not found in any of the numerous short-haired Felidæ that I have examined, and it is a feature which demands explanation. I know no other mammal, ungulate or carnivore, that has any pattern resembling this; indeed, if one were to photograph the pattern in question and a few inches of the skin surrounding it, and be told that it came from the back of a mammal one could not doubt that it was a hall-mark of the King of Beasts. It would not produce that thrill of intense interest which we felt at the meeting on 7th May, 1901, at the Zoological Society of London, when from a water colour sketch and three pieces of skin taken from the body of a hitherto unknown mammal, Sir Harry Johnston proceeded to reconstruct the Okapi, at first dubbed knight, as a member of the Equidæ, but later promoted downwards to the Giraffidæ. But one could do no less, with some knowledge of the hair of mammals, than reconstruct from such a photograph a large, powerful and ferocious carnivore, and where but in the lion can the greatest example of those attributes be found? I say this advisedly, for this remarkable pattern of the lion’s back is as much a stamp of his moral or mental quality as the Inguinal Pedometer is of the locomotive _rôle_ in life of _equus caballus_.