There are not many leopards in this province; the stragglers merely from the interior of Africa show themselves occasionally in Kordofan. They will sometimes approach the villages, but instances of their having done an injury to man are very rare. They mostly steal their prey from one of the herds, but immediately withdraw with it to their covert, but are by no means as bold as they may be in the more internal tracts of this and another quarter of the globe. They are not hunted, partly from want of fire-arms, partly because the skin, the only portion of value about them, is not much in request, and a leopard is very rarely, indeed, known to have been killed in any district. Hyænas, of which there are said to be three varieties, are far more numerous. The striped species is the most common in Egypt and Syria; but the tiger-skinned hyæna is far larger, and if the third variety exist it has never come under my own observation. They form herds of ten or twenty animals, secrete themselves during the day in the caves and ravines of the neighbouring mountains, which they merely quit at night, when they go in quest of prey, and on these occasions they gradually separate. Dead bodies, which they dig out of the graves, are their favourite food, and they immediately scent out where a corpse has been interred, whether in the desert or in the burial-ground. They are also fond of picking out the young sheep from a flock, although these are enclosed during the night within a dense fence of thorn-hedging. The hyæna, however, understands mining, digs beneath the fence, and frequently breaks in upon a flock. They never do any harm to man, and there is scarcely a single instance on record of a hyæna having seized upon a man, and those, indeed, known, were only occasions where they had been greatly irritated or wounded. In Europe, this animal is very much calumniated as being the most ferocious and most cruel of all wild beasts, thus, at least, it is described in nearly all the books on natural history; one author, in fact, copies the error from the other, without investigating his subject more closely; hence the opinion first gained ground and subsequently became prevalent in the whole of Europe, that the hyæna is the most formidable of all quadrupeds. I and several other Europeans have convinced ourselves, that it is not only not feared, but totally disregarded by the natives. It is timid, may be cowed by blows, and rather endeavours to secrete itself than to attack. The circumstance of its disinterring dead bodies and devouring them is no proof of its being the most formidable or ferocious animal; for if it can surprise sheep or gazelles, it prefers them, but hunger oftentimes forces it to dig up a corpse, and feed off it. Its forepaws are certainly adapted by nature for digging in the earth, but there are sufficient instances of dogs having scratched out the bodies of the dead and eaten them. In Hungary, Poland, and Russia, examples of