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Updated: June 26, 2025
Not only has the Polar bear proved to be a very different animal from his brown congener, but other species have turned up in remote quarters of the globe: until the list of these interesting quadrupeds has been extended to the number of at least a dozen distinct species differing not only in size, shape, and colour, but also in many more essential characteristics.
The picturesque old kingdom of Georgia, lying south of the Caucasus between the Black and Caspian seas, was the home of that fair and gifted race which, fallen from its high estate, had become the victim of the Turks, and, with its congener Circassia, had long provided the harems of the Ottoman Empire with beautiful slaves.
The Sá Leonite has ever distinguished himself by kicking down, as the phrase is, the ladder which raised him. No man maltreats his wild brother so much as the so-called 'civilised' negro: he never addresses his congener except by 'You jackass! and tells him ten times a day that he considers such trash like the dirt beneath his feet.
His nearest congener in our own tongue is Cowper. In the whole school there is a sickly taint.
The low country Wanderoo is replaced in the hills by the larger species, P. ursinus, which inhabits the mountain zone. The natives, who designate the latter the Maha or Great Wanderoo, to distinguish it from the Kaloo, or black one, with which they are familiar, describe it as much wilder, and more powerful than its congener of the lowland forests.
For reasons obvious upon reflection, the competition is often, if not generally, most severe between nearly related species when they are in contact, so that one drives the other before it, as the Hanoverian the old English rat, the small Asiatic cockroach in Russia, its greater congener, etc.
No man who has not built up his system during a long expedition with brick after brick of pork fried hard in its own ooze, who has not turned all his brain's active phosphorus into phosphate of soda by alkali-biscuits drawn from the oven in the hot-dough stage, who has not drunk his pease-coffee without milk at the tables of repeated Pike settlers too shiftless to milk one of their fifty kine, who has not slept myriads in a bed with Cimex lectularius and his livelier congener of the saltatory habits, can imagine what a blissful bay in the iron-bound coast of bad-living Sisson's seemed to us both in fruition and retrospection.
Both of these species are black bears, and termed "oso negro" by the Spanish-Americans; but the Hucumari is distinguished by a white list under the throat, a white breast, a muzzle of a greyish buff colour, and the crescent-like eye markings already mentioned. It is also of a gentler disposition than its congener, smaller in size, and never preys upon other animals.
Those who acknowledge it, are inclined to regard the Syrian bear as a mere variety of the ursus arctos; but this theory is altogether incorrect. In shape, colour, and many of his habits, the Syrian bear differs essentially from his brown congener; and his dwelling-place instead of being in forest-covered tracts is more generally in open ground or among rocks.
If the African Pygmy is as short lived as his Eastern congener, he does not survive, as a rule, many years beyond the age of adolescence, and continues in a stage of childhood, mentally considered, until death.
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