with the cat, and to say
that the lion is a _cat with a mane and a long tail_--this were to
degrade and disfigure nature instead of describing her and denominating
her species." Buffon very rarely uses italics, but those last given are
his, not mine; could words be better chosen to make us see the lion and
the cat as members of the same genus? No wonder the Sorbonne considered
him an infelicitous writer; why could he not have said "cat," and have
done with it, instead of giving a couple of sly but telling touches,
which make the cat as like a lion as possible, and then telling us that
we must not call her one? Sorbonnes never do like people who write in
this way.

"The lion, then, belongs to a most noble species, standing as he does
alone, and incapable of being confounded with the tiger, leopard,
ounce, &c., while, on the contrary, those species, which appear to be
least distant from the lion, are very sufficiently indistinguishable, so
that travellers and nomenclators are continually confounding them."[100]

If this is not pure malice, never was a writer more persistently
unfortunate in little ways. Why remind us here that the species which
come nearest to the lion are so hard to distinguish? Why not have said
nothing about it? As it is, the case stands thus: we are required to
admit close resemblance between the leopard and the tiger, while we are
to deny it between the tiger and the lion, in spite of there being no
greater outward difference between the first than between the second
pair, and in spite of the hurried whisper "_cat with a mane and a long
tail_" still haunting our ears. Isidore Geoffroy and his followers may
consent to this arrangement, but I hope the majority of my readers will
not do so.

I went on to the account of the tiger with some interest to see the line
which Buffon would take concerning it. I anticipated that we should find
cats, pumas, lynxes, &c., to be really very like tigers, and was
surprised to learn that the "true" tiger, though certainly not unlike
these animals, was still to be distinguished from "many others which had
since been called tigers." He is on no account to be confounded with
these, in spite of the obvious temptation to confound him. He is "a rare
animal, little known to the ancients, and badly described by the
moderns." He is a beast "of great ferocity, of terrible swiftness, and
surpassing even the proportions of the lion." The effect of the
description is that we no