I have just mentioned that several officers kept poultry, numbers of which were now taken away every night by some unknown marauder; when a Captain Bolts (suspecting the coati-mondi, or crabbo-dago) made a trap of an empty wine-chest, only by supporting the lid with a stick fixed to a long cord, into which (having first secured all the other poultry) he put a couple of live fowls, the whole guarded by two negroes at some distance. They had not been many hours on their post, when hearing the fowls shriek, one negro pulled the rope, and the other ran to secure the invader by sitting on the lid: when this proved to be actually a young tyger, who would yet have cleared his way by beating against the box, but that it was immediately secured by strong ropes, and drawn along, with the prisoner in it, to the river; where, being held under water, he was drowned, under the most vigorous efforts, by beating against the chest to effect his escape. Captain Bolts ordered the skin to be taken off, which he kept in remembrance of so very strange a circumstance. The Count de Buffon asserts, that there are no tygers in America, but animals much resembling them, which go by that name. I shall however describe them, from actual observation, as I found them, and leave the reader to determine whether they are tygers or not. The first and largest is that called the jaguar of Guiana. This animal, which has by some been represented as a despiseable little creature, not larger than a greyhound, is, on the contrary, very fierce, strong, and dangerous; some of them measuring, from the nose to the root of the tail, not less than six feet: and let us not forget the print of that enormous tyger’s foot, seen by myself in the sand, near Patamaca; though it may be allowed, that creature was of an extraordinary size, and the sand very loose.—The jaguar is of a tawny orange colour, and the belly white; on the back it is spotted with longitudinal black bars; on the sides with irregular rings, light-coloured in the center; and all over the rest of the body, and the tail, the spots are smaller, and perfectly black: its shape is in every sense like that of the African tyger, and being all of the cat kind, they need no particular description; but their size and strength being so much greater than that little domestic animal, they devour a sheep, or a goat, with the same facility as a cat would kill a mouse or a rat; nay, cows and horses are not protected from their attacks, for these they frequently kill on the plantations; and though they cannot carry them off into the forest on account of their weight, they tear and mangle them in a dreadful manner, only for the sake of the blood, with which this ferocious animal is never glutted. It has even happened that the jaguar has carried off young negro women at work in the field, and too frequently their children. This contemptible animal, as it is called and misrepresented by some authors, will beat down a wild boar with a