of the Nuggur division, obtained from me the plan of these pits, and in an equally short time caught upwards of 70 tigers.  Now comes a circumstance which I can vouch for, but cannot explain.  In a short time the success in both divisions terminated, and never again did a tiger fall into one of these pits, though numbers of tigers continued to infest the country.”  One result of the success obtained is worth recording.  The balance of nature had been destroyed; the tigers to a great extent lived on wild pigs, and these, after the destruction of the tigers, multiplied so rapidly that the general records that there was an increased destruction of extensive sugar plantations.  And I may note in passing, that the balance of nature may equally be destroyed from the other end of the line, and tigers made much more destructive than they otherwise would be.  This is remarkably so near the western passes of Mysore, for never were tigers more numerous or destructive than they have recently been in my neighbourhood, and this is clearly to be traced to the great destruction[17] of deer, pigs, and bison by the natives in the immediate vicinity of the great forests, a subject to which I shall afterwards have occasion to allude.

The sudden spread amongst the tigers of the news about these pits is really very remarkable.  We know that animals and birds are taught by example and experience to avoid certain dangers—­that birds, which are at first killed in considerable numbers by telegraph wires, gradually learn to avoid them, and that hares which are at first excluded by rabbit netting in the course of time take to jumping it, but it is certainly impossible to explain by anything we know as regards the spread of experience amongst animals as to how the news could spread amongst the tigers, over a tract of country about half as large as Scotland, for traps were set in two out of the four divisions into which Mysore was then divided.

It has often been a subject of remark that tigers, without any motive that we can even guess at, avoid certain parts of the country which, to us, seem to be equally favourable to them.  This is remarkably so in my district in Mysore, parts of which, apparently quite as suitable for tigers as other parts, have never been known to hold one.  It is also remarkable that they invariably cross from one range of hills to another by almost exactly the same route, at least such is my experience.  These tiger passes as they are called by the natives are well known to them.  There is one about a mile and a half to the north of my bungalow, and another at about the same distance to the south, and between these two points I have never heard of the track of a tiger being seen except on one occasion.