The Tower Menagerie : $b comprising the natural history of the animals contained in that establishment; with anecdotes of their characters and history.Bennett, Edward Turner
History
The Tower Menagerie : $b comprising the natural history of the animals contained in that establishment; with anecdotes of their characters and history.
Such are the outward and physical characteristics of this beautiful
animal; in his moral and intellectual qualities he differs still more
widely from that compound of unteachableness, malice, and mistrust, which
is the necessary result of the low degree of intelligence possessed
by the remainder of the group of animals with which he is at present
associated. Of his habits in a state of nature we have no certain
information; but in his tamed and domesticated condition he has been
rendered, in some countries at least, auxiliary to man, by the successful
cultivation of his mental faculties, which have been trained into a
degree of subservience to the commands of his master, that can only
be surpassed by the superior sagacity of the hound. Chardin, Bernier,
Tavernier, and others of the older travellers had related that in several
parts of Asia it was customary to make use of a large spotted cat in the
pursuit of game, and that this animal was called Youze in Persia, and
Chetah in India; but the statements of these writers were so imperfect,
and the descriptions given by them so incomplete, that it was next to
impossible to recognise the particular species intended. We now, however,
know with certainty that the animal thus employed is the Felis jubata of
naturalists, which inhabits the greater part both of Asia and of Africa.
It is common in India and Sumatra, as well as in Persia; and is well
known both in Senegal and at the Cape of Good Hope; but the ingenuity
of the savage natives of the latter countries has not, so far as we
know, been exerted in rendering its services available in the chase in
the manner so successfully practised by the more refined and civilized
inhabitants of Persia and of Hindostan. In Senegal it is valued only on
account of its skin, which forms an important article in the commerce of
that colony; while at the Cape, where it is known to the Dutch settlers
by the misapplied name of Luipard (Leopard), it seems to be entirely
neglected even in a commercial point of view. In the neighbourhood of the
latter colony, it should be added, the animal appears from the testimony
of travellers to be of rare occurrence; and Professor Lichtenstein,
in particular, mentions an instance in which the skin of one was worn
by the chief of a horde of Caffres as a badge of peculiar dignity and
distinction.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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