Of the order FERAE, the family felidae, there is perhaps no animal in the wide range of all zoology, so eminently fitted for destruction as the tiger.  His whole structure and appearance, combining beauty and extreme agility with prodigious strength, his ferocity, and his cunning, mark him out as the very type of a beast of prey.  He is the largest of the cat tribe, the most formidable race of quadrupeds on earth.  He is the most bloodthirsty in habit, and the most dreaded by man.  Whole tracts of fertile fields, reclaimed from the wild luxuriance of matted jungle, and waving with golden grain, have been deserted by the patient husbandmen, and allowed to relapse into tangled thicket and uncultured waste on account of the ravages of this formidable robber.  Whole villages have been depopulated by tigers, the mouldering door-posts, and crumbling rafters, met with at intervals in the heart of the solitary jungle, alone marking the spot where a thriving hamlet once sent up the curling smoke from its humble hearths, until the scourge of the wilderness, the dreaded ‘man-eater,’ took up his station near it, and drove the inhabitants in terror from the spot.  Whole herds of valuable cattle have been literally destroyed by the tiger.  His habitat is in those jungles, and near those localities, which are most highly prized by the herdsmen of India for their pastures, and the numbers of cattle that yearly fall before his thirst for blood, and his greed for living prey, are almost incredible.  I have scarcely known a day pass, during the hot months, on the banks of the Koosee, that news of a kill has not been sent in from some of the villages in my ilaka, and as a tiger eats once in every four or five days, and oftener if he can get the chance, the number of animals that fall a prey to his insatiable appetite, over the extent of Hindustan, must be enormous.  The annual destruction of tame animals by tigers alone is almost incredible, and when we add to this the wild buffalo, the deer, the pig, and other untamed animals, to say nothing of smaller creatures, we can form some conception of the destruction caused by the tiger in the course of a year.

His whole frame is put together to effect destruction.  In cutting up a tiger you are impressed with this.  His tendons are masses of nerve and muscle as hard as steel.  The muscular development is tremendous.  Vast bands and layers of muscle overlap each other.  Strong ligaments, which you can scarcely cut through, and which soon blunt the sharpest knife, unite the solid, freely-playing, loosely-jointed bones.  The muzzle is broad, and short, and obtuse.  The claws are completely retractile.  The jaws are short.  There are two false molars, two grinders above, and the same number below.  The upper carnivorous tooth has three lobes, and an obtuse heel; the lower has two lobes, pointed and sharp, and no heel.  There is one very small tuberculous tooth above as an auxiliary, and then the strong back teeth.  The muscles of the jaws are of tremendous power.  I have come across the remains of a buffalo killed by a tiger, and found all the large bones, even the big strong bones of the pelvis and large joints, cracked and crunched like so many walnuts, by the powerful jaws of the fierce brute.