TIGER (Lat. tigris, from Gk. Tiypes, tiger; probably connected with Av. tiyra, arrow, tiyra, sharp, Skt. tij, to be sharp, Gk. stizein, to mark, puncture, and ultimately with Eng. stick). The largest and most powerful of eats, Fells tigris, and the most specialized and efficient of the Carnivora, comparable only with the lion, and very similar in size and structure. but very different in appearance and habits. It is more slen der and eat-like than the lion, and has a rounder bead and no trace of a mane, but the hair of the cheeks is rather long and spreading. Its skull may be distinguished from that of the lion by the fact that the nasal bones reach backward beyond the frontal processes of the maxillte. The males are rather larger than the females, and make a more square, less oval footprint o• 'pug.' The pupil of the eye is round, however much con tracted. The average size of an adult male is 914, feet from nose to tip of tail. Authentic measurements exceeding 11 feet are very rare, and stories of 15 to IS feet entirely erroneous. Its height at the shoulder is proportionately less than that of the lion, a large male measuring from to 31 feet. A ten-foot tiger will weigh About 500 pounds. The hair is thick, fine, and shining; in the colder countries thicker and longer than in tropical regions. The color is a bright tawny yellow, beautifully marked with dark transverse bands, passing into pure white on the under parts; the dark bands are continued as rings on the tail, which is long and tapering and has no terminal tuft. These colors and stripes, sometimes broken, although so conspicu ous in a caged tiger, or one standing in the open, in daylight, so blend with the dusky gloom and slender shadows of the bamboo jungle or long grass in which the animal lurks as to make it practically invisible.
The tiger inhabits Asia, where it has an ex tensive but rather localized distribution. West wardly its range extends to the Lower Euphrate: and the southern shores of the Caspian; but it does not occur in Persia south of the Elburz Mountains, nor in Beluchistan or Afghanistan. Northward, it is to be found throughout South ern Siberia and INlongolia, eastward in the Amur Valley to the Sea of Okhotsk, in Saghalien and Japan. The elevated Tibetan plateau has no tigers. Southward the species ranges through out China, Siam, Burma, the Malay Peninsula, Sumatra. .Java, and Bali, and all of India, but is unknown in Ceylon. The last-mentioned cir cumstance is a strong part of the evidence which has led naturalists to conclude that the tiger is a comparatively recent immigrant into the south, and that it is not naturally a tropical species.
In general the tiger is .an inhabitant of the woods and thickets rather than of open lands, and although able to leap into or climb trees (except smooth, perfectly upright ones), it does so only for some special purpose. Usually it hides in some dense cover by day, and goes abroad at night in search of prey. It is most numerous in the swampy shore jungles around the Bay of Bengal and on the Malayan coasts and marshy estuaries, where it swims miles from island to island, or across rivers and inlets.
Its prey consists of almost anything in the way of flesh, from a bison o• crocodile to any small creature which it may think it worth its while to strike down. Carrion may be eaten
under stress of famine, but as a rule the ani mal devours only what it has itself killed, and ordinarily does not even return a second time to a carcass from which it has taken one full meal. It searches for and stalks its prey, or lies in ambush and leaps upon it like other eats; and its method of killing large animals, so far as it may be said to practice one, is to seize the shoulders with one paw, grasp the forehead with the other, and break the neck by a twisting pull. A band of bison or wild oxen, guarded by bulls (see BisoN), will beat it off, and often kill it ; even a single bull in favorable circumstances is a match for it. The elephant and rhinoceros have little to fear, and a hear will make a stout resistance, but such encounters rarely occur; nor do fights between male tigers seem to be com mon, as this cat is not, like the lion, polygamous. In India and eastward the tiger subsists large ly upon domestic cattle and hogs, and upon. human beings. 'Man-eaters.' when they do not wholly depend upon human victims, apparently prefer them; many, but not all, of these victims are old and comparatively feeble. The destruc tion of human life in India and eastward is very great, and there seems little diminution in spite of improved arms, an increasing number of sportsmen, and Government rewards. In 1902 about 1300 lives were so lost in British India alone. The prey when struck down is usually carried away by the tiger to be eaten elsewhere, and extravagant stories of the tiger's strength have been related in connection with this habit. It is absurd to speak of its leaping a palisade with a buffalo or even a man in its mouth. A tiger will lift from the ground and partly carry, partly drag, an animal of 200 or 300 pounds weight, with considerable ease; but heavier ones must be laboriously dragged.
Tigers are solitary beasts, rarely hunting even in pairs, and much less noisy than the lion. Their usual call is a prolonged, moaning, thrill ing sound, repeated twice or thrice and becom ing louder or quicker. In the cooler season they wander widely, but in the hot weather remain in some narrow district near water—a single one in each 'beat.' ffigresses breed irregularly, once in two or three years only, regardless of season, and produce usually two cubs, almost invariably one male and the other female. The cubs require three years to reach maturity and stay with their mother most of this time. When caught young tigers may easily be tamed, but are more difficult to rear and less tractable than lions. Captive and tamed tigers have been kept by the East Indian rulers from the days of an tiquity, and a favorite amusement was to pit them in the arena against lions, in which com bats they were usually victorious. The 'royal Bengal tiger' has been a part of the showman's stock in trade ever since, and is to he seen in every menagerie, where these animals breed, but less readily than do the lions. Some have been trained to go through certain performances.