Their food consists of about five pounds of beef per day for each: this the keeper generally tosses up in front of their den, at the distance of nearly two feet from the bars, and to the height of six or eight feet from the floor. The animals, who are on the alert for their dinner, immediately leap towards the bars, and, darting out their paws with incredible swiftness, almost uniformly succeed in seizing it before it falls to the ground. If, as it sometimes happens, the meat is thrown up at too great a distance, so as not to be fairly within reach, they remain perfectly stationary and make no attempt to spring upon it, but watch it with anxious avidity, apparently calculating and comparing the distance of the object and the extent of their own grasp. When they have, in this way, secured their meal, instead of ravenously falling to, like the other carnivorous animals in the collection, they stand growling over it for some minutes, leering upon each other with the most frightful contortions. This growling attitude of mistrust in feeding was constantly maintained by the female, even before she had a companion in her captivity, and when consequently there existed no immediate object for the excitement of her selfish or envious feelings.
It can scarcely fail to have been remarked by those who have perused the preceding pages with moderate attention that the species of cats described in them, including the largest and most formidable of the whole genus, are exclusively natives of the Old World, and confined to the hot and burning climates of Southern Asia and of Africa. A second and more numerous class, of which, however, no example exists at present in the Tower Menagerie, and which, consequently, it does not fall within our province to illustrate, occupy the colder and northern regions of both hemispheres. These belong principally to the same subdivision with the Lynx (being, like him, distinguished by the pencils of long hairs which surmount their ears), and to that which comprehends the domestic cat; and are all of diminutive size and trifling power when compared with those monstrous productions of the torrid zone, the Lion, the Tiger, and the Leopard. The reader is not, however, to imagine that the smaller species exist only in the vicinity of the pole and in the temperate regions of the earth: he will find, on the contrary, that many of them are natives of more southern climes, and commit their petty ravages under as fierce a sun as that which fires their more dreaded competitors in the career of rapine and of blood. Of one of these, the true Lynx of antiquity, we shall have occasion to treat in a subsequent article.