312 ANNUAL OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY. 



barbarians of Britain, who civilized so many races with her grave 

 and patient justice, never civilized the cat. The cat remained to 

 the Romans, says Dr. Rolleston, the thief of the ponltry-yard, but 

 never became the humble dependent of the house. In the ancient 

 world it needed the more feline nature of orientals to appreciate 

 fully its grace and its repose, its strictly limited ferocity of nature 

 developed only toward inferiors, the complete union of its capaci- 

 ties for domestic quiet and useful carnivorous, energy, its art of 

 sleepily ignoring man and yet utterly depending on him, its utter 

 want of restless anxiety concerning human affairs, its lazy vigi- 

 lance for meals, and, finally, its Buddhist thirst for Nigban (or Nir- 

 vana) absorption in absolute vacuity of mind when not under 

 the dominion of any appetite. This was not the kind of creature 

 over whom Romans were likely to exercise sway. They could 

 not rule the cat by any sense of justice. Indeed, it is something 

 of a surprise to us to find that even the white-breasted marten or 

 weasel was sufficiently open to the sense of law to have been in 

 any degree domesticated by that national genius for military and 

 judicial government. Perhaps it was the invading spirit of the 

 white-breasted marten which succumbed to the Roman genius 

 of conquest. Dr. Rolleston tells us that the marten was strictly 

 troglodyte, and destroyed its enemies by following them into their 

 holes, not by catching them when outside. This must have been 

 the quality which endeared it to the Roman rule, and made the 

 martens submit to the domestic yoke of a people so successful in 

 piercing in similar operations the wildest retreats of its mountain 

 enemies. The cat, though aggressive on its peculiar prey, does 

 not possess the genius for territorial invasion, and would not there- 

 fore have been likely to have been drawn toward the Romans, like 

 the weasel, by this peculiar genius of his. The cat lurks in am- 

 bush, where the weasel invades, and the former was never a favor- 

 ite Roman manoeuvre. It is not perhaps, then, so surprising that 

 the cat had to wait its time for being taken up into the essence of 

 European civilization, till the European genius became modified 

 to some extent by the more subtle spirit of the East. It was in 

 Constantinople, the very nearest point to Asia, if we under- 

 stand Dr. Rolleston aright, that the cat first made her appearance 

 as a domestic animal. She seems to have passed into the domes- 

 tic life of Europe soon after the first General Council, and from 

 Constantinople to have moved westward. Her approach was 

 everywhere welcome, for, as she had gained apotheosis in Egypt 

 by protecting the grain harvests of the Nile from the marauding 

 rats and mice, so in Europe she has been able to keep down these 

 hungry creatures quite as successfully as the weasel, and to adapt 

 herself more completely to human habits and to local attachments 

 as well. Dr. Rolleston points out that cats, besides being gentler 

 and cleaner, are less " plastic" in their habits than weasels, less 

 disposed, that is, to run wild, and in many climates even incapable 

 of supporting themselves by their own wits in the wilderness, in 

 the absence of man ; in other words, while the presence of man 

 is not necessary to the weasel, but only the weasel (in the absence 



