So in Africa and Asia the lion and the leopard reign, while the tiger is confined to Asia, ranging up to the snowy regions in the Caucasus Mountains and Mantchuria, where he is covered with a warm coat of hair. Yet all these animals have but a small kingdom now compared to olden times; and man has so cleared the ground in other parts of the world that we must travel away to South America to find the other large felines, the fierce Jaguar and Puma. There the jaguar, second only in strength to the tiger, carries all before him, making havoc among the peccaries and the herds of wild horses, and even fishing in the rivers for turtles and fish; scooping the turtles out of their shell with his sharp claws, and conquering every animal except the great ant-bear in whose embrace he has been found dead after he had also killed his enemy. The puma, meanwhile, contents himself usually with smaller prey,--sheep and rheas, opossums and monkeys, for he can climb like a cat, and passes much of his life in the trees. Thus, though the cat family wander over the whole earth, the larger kinds live chiefly in the warm parts of the world where life is luxuriant and man has not yet driven them out. But these are not all the wild flesh-feeders. There remains a third group--a lazy, easy-going, lumbering group, which, though they spread from the equator to the poles, have taken chiefly to temperate and colder regions for their home, to mixed food for their nourishment, and have gone off on a line as far from the wolves on the one side as the lions have on the other. This group is the Bears, and it is a very curious one in many ways. For, in the first place, though they are large and strong animals, they have very much given up eating flesh-food, and have taken to berries and acorns, fruits, vegetables, and honey. To get this last they even climb the trees to dig out the comb with their paw, trusting to their thick shaggy hair to protect them from the stings, which, however, they sometimes receive rather heavily on the nose. [Illustration: Fig. 78. Polar Bear[177] and Walrus.[178] Showing how the Bear walks with the heel flat on the ground, and the Walrus also.]