Cougar
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Cougar. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
koo'gar, the largest American animal of the cat family, called panther and "painter" in the Eastern States, mountain lion in the Rockies, and known sometimes as the American puma. Cougar is the name used by the Indians of Brazil. The cougar has a reddish, tawny color, very much resembling that of the deer, on which indeed it chiefly feeds. It is from six to eight feet long. A large specimen weighs 225 pounds. It is readily mistaken by a deer, it is said, for one of its own kind. The cougar hunts like a cat, taking its position on the branch of a tree overhanging the runway of the deer. It is an excellent climber. The cry of the male cougar is blood curdling, and has stricken terror into the heart of many a settler. The cry of the female is not unlike the wail of a child, a fact utilized by Cooper in his Deerslayer. The cougar has a wonderful cat-like faculty for stealing through undergrowth, over rocks, and past obstructions without noise. When deer fail, it springs upon rabbits, squirrels, grouse, small birds, and small quadrupeds. Its visits are dreaded by stock raisers from Montana to the Argentine Republic. It is still found in the Allegheny Mountains, but rarely. The cougar has a fierce, crafty, ferocious face; but except in defence of its young, it seldom attacks man. It is hunted to best advantage with dogs, who drive it into a tree and hold it there until the hunter arrives with his rifle. A menagerie is expected to pay about $75 for a good live specimen. The cougar in the East has been described in many hunting stories. Theodore Roosevelt's Hunting Trips of a Ranchman gives some account of its depredations in the West. According to a peculiar custom, corresponding to tiger worship in India, the cougar was reverenced by the California Indians, who would not allow one to be killed. The skin of the cougar is much admired for rugs. A large skin is worth about $25. See Cat
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
the name given in Brazil to the puma, formerly called the American lion, and now the American panther. It extended formerly throughout a great part of both North and South America; but it has been destroyed through a great part of the former, except its most southerly portions. It is the Felis concolor or the Puma concolor of naturalists.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's remark in 1910 that the cougar was "still found in the Allegheny Mountains, but rarely" marked the end of a retreat: the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service declared the eastern cougar extinct and removed it from the endangered list in 2018, and the only breeding population left east of the Mississippi is the Florida panther, down to a few dozen animals by the 1970s and recovered to roughly 200 today. Collier's noted in 1921 that the animal had "been destroyed through a great part" of North America; since the 1990s it has moved the other way, recolonizing the Dakotas, Nebraska and beyond, and a young male killed on a Connecticut highway in 2011 was shown by DNA to have come from South Dakota. Bounties have given way to protection or regulated hunting in most western states, and the name in the scientific literature is now Puma concolor rather than Felis concolor, with the old roster of thirty-odd subspecies reduced in a 2017 revision to two. The 225-pound "large specimen" is at the extreme edge of the record; adult males usually run well under 200 pounds.
Written for this edition, 2026.