Lion's skin

“ The deserts of the interior of Africa, Persia, India, and Japan, are inhabited by these animals. The skin of the lion was formerly used as the tunic of heroes. At this day it serves both as a mantle and a bed for many of the African tribes. His flesh, though of strong and disagreeable flavour, is occasionally eaten by the savages, who do not dislike it the more on that account. The fat of the lion is considered to possess many medicinal properties.
It is a characteristic of the lion that he does not often attack any animal openly, unless provoked, or impelled by hunger. ”

“ There is before me a Lion's skin, a spoil of one of these animals shot by the celebrated sportsman, Gordon Cumming. Although the skin lies flat upon the floor, and the paws are nothing but the skin and talons, the weight of each paw is very considerable, and always surprises those who hear it fall on the floor.
There are several Hebrew words which are used for the Lion, but that which signifies the animal in its adult state is derived from an Arabic word signifying strength; and therefore the Lion is called the Strong-one, just as the Bat is called the Night-flier. ”

“ AN Ass found a Lion’s Skin, and dressed himself up in it. Then he went about frightening every one he met, for they all took him to be a lion, men and beasts alike, and took to their heels when they saw him coming. ”

“ Cleodemus was giving his. 'In the left hand take up the tooth of a field-mouse, which has been killed in the manner described, and attach it to the skin of a freshly flayed lion; then bind the skin about your legs, and the pain will instantly cease.' 'A lion's skin?' says Dinomachus; 'I understood it was an uncovered hind's. That sounds more likely: a hind has more pace, you see, and is particularly strong in the feet. A lion is a brave beast, I grant you; his fat, his right fore-paw, and his beard-bristles, are all very efficacious, if you know the proper incantation to use with each ”

“ Early one morning one of our herdsmen came running up to us in great fright, and announced that a lion was devouring a lioness! We thought at first that the man must be mistaken; but his story was perfectly true, and only her skull, the larger bones, and the skin were left. ”

“ Thus he explains the mane of the lion not as a protection, but as the result of the local irritation of the skin due to the habit possessed by fighting lions of seizing one another by the nape of the neck; the coloration and furrowing of the cheek of the mandrill are due to the inheritance of irritations and injuries inflicted by the males in combat ”

“ No epithet could be better deserved, for the Lion seems to be a very incarnation of strength, and, even when dead, gives as vivid an idea of concentrated power as when it was living. And, when the skin is stripped from the body, the tremendous muscular development never fails to create a sensation of awe. The muscles of the limbs, themselves so hard as to blunt the keen-edged knives employed by a dissecter, are enveloped in their glittering sheaths, playing upon each other like well-oiled machinery, and terminating in tendons seemingly strong as steel, and nearly as impervious to the knife. ”

“ In such cases, in addition to the tufts of hair always found on the elbows and in the armpits of lions with fair-sized manes, there will probably be large tufts of hair in each flank just where the thighs join the belly; but I have never yet seen the skin of a lion shot within the last thirty years with the whole belly covered with long, thick hair, as may constantly be observed in lions kept in captivity in the menageries of Europe. ”

“ "For where the lion's skin will not reach, you must patch it out with the fox's." ”

“ I have been employed the whole of the day in skinning a young lion, and it is not yet finished. I am taking the skin off complete. It is the first seal I have skinned in this way, and I find it a very tedious job. I don't know any other animal that would be so difficult to skin. ”

“ They come with one of the feverish attacks and fade away when it has gone, but only to return. After a time infiltration and thickening of the skin become noticeable, and the nodules appear. They are lumpy excrescences, at first pink but changing to brown. Thickening of the skin of the face produces a highly characteristic appearance, recalling the aspect of a lion. The tissues of the eye undergo degenerative changes; the mucous membrane of the nose and throat is thickened, impairing the breathing and the voice; the eyebrows fall off; the ears and nose become thickened and enlarged. ”

“ One day a month later he shot an unusually fine mountain lion in a ravine a mile from his hut, and having carefully skinned the animal, he had it prepared by the wife of one of the vaqueros, who was famous for her skill in such matters, and then took it over on his next visit to the hacienda as a present to Isabella. The girl was in the garden as he rode up, and was delighted with the skin.
"It is one of the finest that I have ever seen," she said, "and there is not a single scratch on it. Most of the skins are disfigured by the wounds the animals give each other in their fights." ”

“ Having adhered to that beast’s skin, the irritation produced and the impossibility of getting it off at last induces the lion to bite it, and once in his mouth he cannot remove it, and so the animal dies miserably. ”

“ I, we have a variation of the other Æsopian fable of the lion who is afraid of the ass. The old witch, in order to deliver herself from the lion which Petrosinella has caused to rise, flays an ass and dresses herself in its skin; the lion, believing it to be really an ass, runs off.—In the thirteenth of the Sicilian stories collected by Signora Laura Gonzenbach, and published at Leipzig by Brockhaus, the ass and the lion dispute the spoil; the young hero divides it, giving to the ass the hay that the lion has in its mouth, and to the lion the bones in the ass's mouth. ”

“ It is bold, commits great havoc among the cattle; and is supposed to have been driven out of Cutch, by the practice adopted by the natives, of burning their grass. A nail or prickle at the end of a lion's tail is often found, but has nothing to do with the caudal vertebræ. It is probably a hardened piece of skin, or a mass of agglutinated hairs, in the manner of horn; it comes off with only a slight touch.
Lions come to their full strength at five years, but live a long time; for instance, one from the Gambia was proved to be sixty-three years of age. ”

“ Lions, I think, must often lose their prey through the very sharpness of their claws, which cut like knives through the skin and flesh of a heavy animal in motion. I have known several instances of a lion overtaking a horse that had only had a short start. In such a case a lion will not land with a flying leap right on to a horse's back. It gallops close along the ground until it is almost under the horse's tail, and then, rearing itself up on its hind-legs, seizes it on either flank, endeavouring to hold it with the protruded claws of its great fore-paws. ”

“ Once the kill is made, the lion disembowels the beast very neatly indeed, and drags the entrails a few feet out of the way. He then eats what he wants, and, curiously enough, seems often to be very fond of the skin. ”

“ His roar (which is so suggestive, towards its end, of that animal who once dressed himself up in his skin) is literally after his prey. The Lion, it is stated, does not roar except upon a full stomach. The Lion is mainly nocturnal in its habits, and is said to be not in the least dangerous if unprovoked in the daytime ”

“ In consequence of this the operation of skinning a Lion or Bear is a comparatively easy one. After the first cut the beast may be pulled out of his skin, almost without further use of the knife; while with an Antelope or an Ox the skin has to be cut away carefully and laboriously from the underlying flesh. ”

“ I tell you this that you may realize, as I did not, the size to which a wild lion grows. Either menagerie specimens are stunted in growth, or their position and surroundings tend to belittle them, for certainly until a man sees old Leo in the wilderness he has not understood what a fine old chap he is.
This tremendous weight is sheer strength. A lion's carcass when the skin is removed is a really beautiful sight. The great muscles lie in ropes and bands; the forearm thicker than a man's leg, the lithe barrel banded with brawn ”

“ If a horse has once been bitten by a lion, or if another horse tied up close to it has been attacked, it will probably ever afterwards evince great fear at the smell of a lion. But, on the other hand, I have had several horses in my possession, which I bought in the Cape Colony or the Orange Free State, which, when I had trained them to carry the meat of antelopes, never showed the slightest sign of fear when a reeking lion skin was put on their backs, although they could never possibly have seen or smelt a lion before I took them up country. ”

“ Then the carcase is again torn open at the anus, and the soft meat of the buttocks is devoured in great lumps, which are swallowed whole with the skin attached. No lion will ever scrunch up heavy bones like a hyæna, but should he kill an animal in good condition, he will swallow all the comparatively soft bones of the brisket, and also gnaw off the ends of all the rib-bones. The idea that lions will not eat the flesh of any animal which they have not killed themselves is quite erroneous. ”

“ A few years later, however, Lo Bengula, the last chief of the Matabele, gave me the skin of a lion which had been killed near the upper course of the Umzingwani river, not far from Bulawayo, with a very fine mane. In this specimen the tufts of hair in the flanks were very profuse, almost meeting across the belly, and there were a few long hairs all over the under parts of the skin. There is also, I think, good evidence to show that in the more southerly portions of South Africa lions not infrequently developed a growth of long hair all over their bellies ”

“ But there is a curious superstition about the lion, which prohibits any one from walking round its body, or even its skin. One day, when a lion had been killed, and its body brought into the village, Captain Grant measured it, and was straightway assailed by the chief priest of the place for breaking the law in walking round the animal while he was measuring it. ”

“ In appearance the mountain lion is very similar to the African lioness, having a smooth, tawny skin, without any mane; a full-grown animal that will measure from seven to eight feet from its nose to the end of the tail and weighs about 180 pounds, is considered a large specimen. They seldom exceed this, and more frequently fall below it. ”

“ The hairs that issue from a thick skin are rough, while those on females are of a finer quality. Those found on the horse’s mane are more abundant, which is the case also with the shoulders of the lion. ”

“ Burying a lion’s heart in the house is regarded as fire insurance against its being struck by lightning, “for the lion is accustomed to roar when he hears thunder.” Digestion is aided by drinking water in which the dried liver of a lion has been left for a short time. Placing a bit of the skin from between a bear’s eyes over one’s heart removes timidity and anxiety. ”

“ One of the most extraordinary features about lions to me is the way so large an animal can obliterate itself; they simply blend into the landscape. Their brownish-yellow skins, so similar in colour to the burnt grass, and their agile bodies, which can crouch and wriggle like any lizard, play parts in the scheme for invisibility. On one occasion Cecily and I surprised a lion in a small nullah. ”

“ On the other hand, I remember the colour of the eyes of wild lions as being of a flaming yellow, which retains its fierce brilliancy for many hours after death. Should a lion be shot through the loins and injured in such a way that, its hind-quarters being paralysed, it can be closely approached without danger, its fierce eyes seem ablaze with bright yellow flame, and give complete expression to the awful fury by which it is possessed. ”

“ Pliny recommends eating the flesh and heart of a lion to persons afflicted with colds. The lion’s bones are so hard that they strike fire like flint. The hollow in its bones is very small and rarely contains any marrow, and then only in the hip bones, as Experimenter [1290] says. Lion’s fat is an antidote for poisons, and a man anointed with it and wine puts to flight all beasts and snakes. It is hotter than the fat of any other quadruped. The lion is almost always feverish, and that with quartan fever. ”

“ The eyes of the Feline tribe—of every face in nature a striking and important feature—vary in the different species, and are capable of much alteration in the same animal; as instinctive impulse, or internal emotion, changes the expression of his countenance; and also from the degrees of light which act upon their pupils. Of Lions the pupils of the eyes are circular, and not of a yellow colour, as has been stated in the most diffuse modern dissertations on the Carnivora, but black. It is the iris of the Lion’s eye that is yellow. They appear to be best suited to nocturnal, or twilight, vision ”

“ He carries his head high and walks with a slowness which may well pass for majesty. He always appears calm and dignified and conscious of his strength. The bushy and magnificent mane which overshadows his head and neck gives an added grandeur to his appearance.
Some adult Lions have attained a length of nearly ten feet, from the tip of the nose to the root of the tail; but usually they do not exceed six or seven feet. With the exception of the mane and a tuft of hair at the tip of the tail, the coat of the Lion is entirely smooth, and of a tawny color. ”