wild cats are great climbers, so it must be that lions have lived so long where there are few trees that they just forgot how to climb, The lion has forgotten to have stripes, or spots, too. His coat is of a uniform yellowish-brown, the color of sand and dry grass. All the other wild cats, and many tame ones, have beautiful markings. The tiger is banded in black and reddish fawn. The leopard is covered with big black polka dots on a golden fawn ground. The jaguar, or South American tiger is dot-in-a-ring spotted. But here is a curious thing. Although the grown up lion hasn't a sign of a spot or stripe about him, lion cubs often show faint markings that disappear as they grow older.
Scientists tell us that the young of many animals show, in some such way, how their ancestors looked ages and ages ago. Once, perhaps, there were no lions, as we see them today, only big striped and spotted cats that slowly changed into lions because of the open plains they had to hunt on. In the dancing sunspots and shadows of the leafy jungles, and in the foliage of thick trees, the tiger and leopard are safely hidden, but on level, treeless, brown plains they could be seen a long way off. But, while he had to paint out his spots and stripes, the African lion grew a beautiful dark mane that makes his head appear much larger, fiercer and nobler than that of any other cat. He grew a tuft of hair and a horny cone on the tip of his tail to lash himself into a rage. And he grew a terrifying roar, too!
Maybe you have heard a big African lion roar in a zoo. You can hear him a mile. That roar starts all the other animals. The tiger screams, the jaguar cries piouw! something like pussy's meouw. The bear " 'ist growls," the buffaloes bellow, the elephants trumpet. All the fierce, fighting animals are thrown into a rage by that roar, and the timid ones tremble with fear. Some of them run, but others seem unable to move.
Maybe that is why the lion roars when he is on the hunt—to paralyze his prey with fear. He lies on the bank of a stream waiting, as pussy waits at a mouse hole, for some timid antelope, whose only safety is in his heels, to come down to drink. Then he springs with a roar. The way he roars in a zoo isn't anything to what he can do in the roaring line at home. He has several kinds of roars. Sometimes he moans like the wind in the tree tops. Sometimes he rumbles like faraway thunder. Sometimes he gets his neighbors to help him give a desert concert on a dark, stormy night. But it is worst of all when one party of lions meets another and they all roar at
