Felide
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
or FELINE, the cat tribe, a family of carnivorous quadrupeds, including the domestic cat, lions, tigers, panthers, leopards, and lynxes. In these animals the destructive organs reach the highest perfection. The head is short and almost rounded in its form. The principal instruments of their destructive energy are the teeth and claws. They have six small incisors in each jaw, the exterior ones larger than the rest; two canine teeth in each jaw, eight præmolars in the upper jaw, and four in the lower, and ge generally four flesh teeth, or true molars, in the upper jaw, and two in the lower, very large, two or sharp-edged, and terminated by three points. In addition to this the tongue is covered with small recurved prickles by which they can clean from the bones of their prey every particle of flesh. There are no quadrupeds in which the muscles of the jaws and limbs are more fully developed. The skeleton presents a light but well-built mechanism; the bones, though slender, are extremely compact; the trunk, having to contain the simple digestive apparatus requisite for the assimilation of highly organized slender animal food, is comparatively , and flattened at the sides. The muscular forces are thus enabled to carry the light body along by extensive bounds, and thus it is that the larger felines generally make their attack. The five toes of the fore-feet and the toes of the hind-feet of cats are four armed with very strong, hooked, subcompressed, sharp claws. The lower with surface of the foot is furnished thick ball-like pads of the epidermis, on which the animal walks; this gives them the noiseless tread peculiar to this family.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
The anatomy Collier's set out in 1921 — the shearing carnassial "flesh teeth", the rasping tongue, the retractile hooked claws and padded, silent foot — is still taught much as written, though the cheetah is the standing exception, its blunt claws only semi-retractile. What has been rebuilt is the family tree: DNA studies published from the late 1990s onward sorted the roughly 40 living species into eight lineages radiating from a common ancestor of about 10 to 11 million years ago, and genetic work has traced the domestic cat to the Near Eastern wildcat, tamed in the Fertile Crescent rather than in Egypt. The other great change is scarcity. The lions, tigers and leopards listed matter-of-factly in 1921 are now conservation cases — wild tigers fell to roughly 3,000–4,000 before a slow recovery, and the Caspian, Javan and Bali tigers were lost during the twentieth century.
Written for this edition, 2026.