stories of this character, it is really a very wonderful coincidence
that they should be met with in countries so widely separated as
Patagonia and Central America. Pumas, doubtless, are scarce in
Guatemala; and, as in other places where they have met with nothing but
persecution from man, they are shy of him; but had this adventure
occurred on the pampas, where they are better known, the person
concerned in it would not have said that the puma played with him as a
cat with a mouse, but rather as a tame cat plays with a child; nor,
probably, would he have been terrified into imagining that the animal,
even after its caresses had met with so rough a return, was about to
spring on him.

In Clavigero's _History of Lower California,_ it is related that a very
extraordinary state of things was discovered to exist in that country by
the first missionaries who settled there at the end of the seventeenth
century, and which was actually owing to the pumas. The author says that
there were no bears or tigers (jaguars); these had most probably been
driven out by their old enemies; but the pumas had increased to a
prodigious extent, so that the whole peninsula was overrun by them; and
this was owing to the superstitious regard in which they were held by
the natives, who not only did not kill them, but never ventured to
disturb them in any way. The Indians were actually to some extent
dependent on the puma's success in hunting for their subsistence; they
watched the movements of the vultures in order to discover the spot in
which the remains of any animal it had captured had been left by the
puma, and whenever the birds were seen circling about persistently over
one place, they hastened to take possession of the carcass, discovered
in this way. The domestic animals, imported by the missionaries, were
quickly destroyed by the virtual masters of the country, and against
these enemies the Jesuits preached a crusade in vain: for although the