The hyæna is known by two names in the east, Deeb and Dubbah. His proper name is Dubbah, and this is the name he goes by among the best Arabian naturalists. In Abyssinia, Nubia, and part of Arabia, he is, both in writing and conversation, called Deeb, or Deep, either ending with a b or p; and here the confusion begins, for though Dubbah is properly a hyæna, Dabbu is a species of monkey; and though Deeb is likewise a hyæna, the same word signifies a jackal; and a jackal being by naturalists called a wolf, Deeb is understood to be a wolf also. In Algiers this difference is preserved strictly; Dubbah is the hyæna; Deeb is the jackal, which run in flocks in the night, crying like hounds. Dubb is a bear, so here is another confusion, and the bear is taken for the hyæna, because Dubb, or Dubbah, seems to be the same word. So Poncet, on the frontiers of Sennaar, complains, that one of his mules was bit in the thigh by a bear, though it is well known there never was any animal of the bear-kind in that, or, I believe, in any other part of Africa. And I strongly apprehend, that the leopards and tigers, which Alvarez and Don Roderigo de Lima mention molested them so much in their journey to Shoa, were nothing else but hyænas. For tigers there are certainly none in Abyssinia; it is an Asiatic animal. Though there are leopards, yet they are but few in number, and are not gregarious, neither, indeed, are the hyænas, only as they gather in flocks, lured by the smell of their food; and of these it would seem there are many in Shoa, for the capital of that province, called Tegulat, means the City of the Hyæna. If the description given by M. de Buffon is an elegant and good one, the draught of the animal is no less so. It is exactly the same creature I have seen on Mount Libanus and at Aleppo, which makes me have the less doubt that there are two species of this animal, the one partaking more of the dog, which is the animal I am now describing, the other more of the nature of the hog, which is the hyæna of M. de Buffon. Of this the reader will be easily satisfied, by comparing the two figures and the measures of them. The same distinction there is in the badger. The animal from which this was drawn was slain at Teawa, and was the largest I had ever seen, being five feet nine inches in length, measuring from his nose to his anus; whereas the hyæna exhibited by M. de Buffon was not half that, it being only three feet two inches nine lines in length. Notwithstanding the great superiority in size by which the hyæna of Atbara exceeded that of M. de Buffon, I did not think him remarkable for his fatness, or that he owed any of his size to his being at that time in more than ordinary keeping; on the contrary, I thought the most of those I had before seen were in a better habit of body. As near as I could guess, he might weigh about 8 stone, horseman’s weight, that is, 14 pound to the stone, or 112 pound.