d or chita. The old
representations were certainly attenuated enough; and the animal
must have been familiar to the crusaders, as we know it was before
them to the Romans.

Mr. Blyth, who speculated on the origin of the name, in one of his
able articles on the felines of India in the _India Sporting Review_
of April 1856, makes no allusion to the above nor to the probable
confusion that may have arisen in the middle ages over the spotted
Cats. Although the term leopard, as applied to panthers, has the
sanction of almost immemorable custom, I do not see why, in writing
on the subject, we should perpetuate the misnomer, especially as most
naturalists and sportsmen are now inclined to make the proper
distinction. I have always avoided the use of the term leopard,
except when speaking of the hunting chita, preferring to call the
others panthers.

Then again we come on disputed ground. Of panthers how many have we,
and how should they be designated? I am not going farther afield than
India in this discussion beyond alluding to the fact that the jaguar
of Brazil is almost identical with our pard as far as marking goes,
but is a stouter, shorter-tailed animal, which justifies his being
classed as a species; therefore we must not take superficial
colouring as a test, but class the black and common pards together;
the former, which some naturalists have endeavoured to made into a
separate species (_Felis melas_), being merely a variety of the
latter. They present the same characteristics, although Jerdon
states that the black is the smaller animal. They have been found
in Java to inhabit the same den, according to Professor Reinwardt
and M. Kuhl, and they inter-breed, as has been proved by the fact
that a female black pard has produced a black and a fulvous cub at
the same birth. This is noticed by Mr. Sanderson in his book, and
he got the information from the director of the Zoological Society's
Menagerie at Amsterdam. "Old Fogy," a constant contributor to the
old _India Sporting Review_, a good sportsman and naturalist, with
whom Blyth kept up a correspondence, wrote in October 1857 that, "in
a litter of four leopard cubs one was quite black; they all died,
but both the parents were of the ordinary colour and marking; they
were both watched at their cave, and at last shot, one with an arrow
through the heart. Near a hill village a black male leopard was often
seen and known to consort with an ordinary female. I have observe