behind the bars, casting malignant glances at
his keeper, whilst the saliva streamed from
his half-opened mouth. On receiving the
tantalising joint (which seemed, by the way,
to have a mighty small proportion of half-
dried meat upon it for the daily allowance of
so powerful an animal), he withdrew with it
sullenly into the furthest and darkest corner
of his den, turning his back upon the
spectators, arid making the progress of his sulky
meal cognisable to us who tarried to pursue
our observations, by a series of loud and sharp
cracks, as the shank-bone and leg-bone of the
dilapidated joint were successively fractured
in the gripe of his powerful jaws. In the course
of about five minutes the hyæna arose, and great
was my astonishment to perceive nothing left
of the leg of mutton but about four inches
of the hardest middle part of the main bone,
licked white, and clean of sinew or periosteum,
and with its two ends projecting in sharp
splinters. All the rest of the joint—tendons,
ligaments, bones—had disappeared, and were
at that moment in course of digestion and
dissolution in the stomach of the seemingly
satisfied beast: who, after licking his thick
black lips a few times, curled himself up in
another corner of the den to enjoy his siesta.

The teeth of this creature, thought I, must
be of a very peculiar character, and different
from those of its neighbours of the feline
tribe; which, superior as they may be in size
and strength, rarely meddle with the bones of
the joints assigned to them. Even a strong
and hungry dog does not crack the smaller
bones he may be unable to bolt without an
obvious effort. But no difficulty of the kind
was apparent in the feeding of the hyæna, in
which the business-like, matter-of-course
comminution of the bones, inch by inch,
seemed more like the effect of some chopping-
machine, than of any special muscular effort.
I determined, therefore, my Mentor having
left me whilst absorbed in contemplation, to
take the first opportunity, when passing
through Lincoln's Inn Fields, to look in at
the College of Surgeons and examine the
skull and teeth of a hyæna, and avail myself
of the explanations which are always so cheerfully
afforded by the eminent gentlemen in
charge of the unrivalled museum of that
institution. I was so fortunate as to find the
Hunterian Professor himself engaged with
the osteological collection, who, on learning
the object of my wishes, kindly took out of a
cabinet a skull of the same species of hyæna
as that which I had lately been studying in
the live state. This species is the spotted
one, peculiar at the present day to the Cape
of Good Hope and the southern division of
Africa. The hyæna of the North of Africa
and Asia is the striped kind, and is smaller
and less ferocious than the spotted one. The
latter, I may as well add, is, zoologically
speaking, the Canis crocuta, Linn., Hyæna
maculata, Thun., Hyæna capensis, Desm., and
Hyæna crocuta, Cuv.  It appears, however, to
be so unmistakeably known to the naturalists
of all nations under the last denomination,
that this might well serve, henceforth, as its
fixed and determinate scientific narne, without
the terminal cypher, or the cumbersome tail
of exploded synonyms.

Leaving words for things, the skull of the
Hyæna crocuta displays, instead of a smooth
dome-like roof of bone over the brain-case, a
sharp and lofty ridge or crest, running lengthwise
from the occiput to between the bony
chambers of the eyes; and from this ridge, the
sides of the cranium slope away to the
contracted parts bounded by the two thick and
strong bent bars of bone, above the cheeks,
which the professor called the "zygomatic
arches." The lofty ridge and the two slopes
of the contracted brain-case serve, as he
informed me, to give firm and extensive attachment
to the principal pair of biting muscles
—enormous masses of flesh that cause the
swelling out of the sides of the hyæna's head,
and the working of which may be plainly
seen, when it is crunching a bone. The
fibres of those muscles converge to pass under
the zygomatic arches in order to be implanted
into two projecting parts, like handles, of the
strong and thick under jaw. Another powerful
pair of muscles is attached to those two
outspanning bony arches, by one end, and to
the outer and under part of the jaw, by the
other end. The chief characters of the skull
thus relate or are subordinate to the extraordinary
moving powers or workers of the jaw,
and indicate the characteristic actions and food
of the animal; and, as all the rest of the structure
harmonises with these habits and that
kind of nutriment, the anatomist, it appears, is
able to divine from a mere fragment of the
skeleton, the nature and affinities of the
animal of which it has formed part.

All the teeth of the hyæna—and they
exhibit much diversity of size and shape—are
wonderfully constructed for the work they
have to perform. You may sometimes see
the beast pinch up, as it were, with its fore-
teeth, a loose bit of the strong membrane,
called periosteum, and strip it off the bone by
a sudden upward jerk of the head. For such
uses, these teeth are fashioned to act as
pincers, but with the holding part more
complex than those of the blacksmith's.

The upper teeth have their crowns divided
by a transverse cleft into a conical front lobe,
and a back ridge which is notched lengthwise;
the lower front teeth have moderately sharp
crowns that fit into the interspace of the
three-lobed upper ones, and take a firm grip
of any strip of ligament or membrane which
may be seized. Next to the fore-teeth—which,
though adapted for holding and crushing,
are, it seems, called incisors, and which are
six in number in both upper and lower jaws
—are the long and strong conical fangs,
called canines, one on each side of both jaws.
These teeth, which are formidable enough, are
by no means, however, so large in proportion