According to Burton, in his “Miracles of Art and Nature,” in Barbary “’tis said they have Lyons so tame that they will gather up Bones in the Street like Dogs, without hurting any Body; and other Lyons that are of so cowardly a Nature that they will run away at the Voice of the least child.” Munster’s notion of the African lion, fig. 11, is impressive, though it is perhaps less nearly allied to the lion of real life than to the lion of the herald, of which fig. 12, from the effigy of Prince John of Eltham, brother of Edward III, in Westminster Abbey, may be taken as a characteristic example. Munster’s lion[38] would satisfy even the country heraldic painter, who was so irate when shown a lion in a travelling menagerie. “What!” cried he, “tell me that’s a lion! Why I’ve painted lions rampant, lions passant, and all soils of lions these five-and-twenty years, and for sure I ought to know what a lion is like better than that!” This lion of Munster is a very different beast to the degenerate lions of Barbary that find a precarious sustenance in collecting discarded bones from the gutter, and slink away at the chiding-of some Arab brat who is inclined to break in upon their sordid repast. [Illustration: FIG. 12.] Nature, when not interfered with by man, ever keeps the balance true: hence “the Leontophonos is only bred where lions are found,” and if the old writers may be trusted (and there is much virtue in an “if”), we have in this an excellent antidote to the bane that a plague of lions would undoubtedly be. The king of beasts, we are told, regards the leontophonos with deadly hatred and crushes the life out of it with its paw, as the smallest portion of its flesh is immediate death to him. To checkmate this decisive action of the lion, we learn from our ancient author that in districts that have a plague of lions the people of the place burn the leontophonos and sprinkle the ashes on other pieces of flesh, and these they lay about as a bait with fatal effect. By this happy arrangement they are free at once of Leo and Leontophonos.