CATS AND THEIR FRIENDSHIPS. 91 



CATS AND THEIR FRIENDSHIPS. 



By W. H. LAERABEE. 



I HAD for ten years a cat whose intelligence interested me 

 greatly and was considered remarkable by all persons who 

 took notice of her. Her confidence in her master and mistress, 

 her evident enjoyment of their society, her happy faculty of put- 

 ting herself upon an understanding with them, her familiar inter- 

 est in matters of the household, the shifts and devices of which 

 she was master, and her sagacity manifested in ways as various 

 as the exigencies she had to meet, evoked frequent admiration 

 and praise. These manifestations led me to look into the subject 

 of knowledge in cats, and I have found that she was not singular, 

 or even exceptional, in the quality of her faculties. She appears 

 to have been a type to which a great many of the more happily 

 trained members of her race can easily measure up. My observa- 

 tions have been naturally extended to other animals, and have led 

 to the conclusion that most domesticated species and many wild 

 ones are capable of and often manifest equally high degrees of 

 mental development. But cats — and dogs too — are more at home 

 with us, have more opportunities to learn, and come under closer 

 and more constant observation than the others. 



The cat belongs to a large and highly specialized family ; to 

 one that is clearly distinguishable from the other families of ani- 

 mals, while the resemblances between its own members is so 

 strong that even the careless, unprofessional observer will hardly 

 fail to assign at a glance an individual of any of its species to it. 

 All the members of the family are, according to Wood, light, 

 stealthy, and silent of foot, quick of ear and eye. They are ex- 

 ceedingly graceful in form and movement, have flexible bodies 

 and limbs — walk, we might say, on tiptoe — are alert and swift in 

 action, and are exceedingly cunning. Between many of them and 

 the cat itself there is hardly any prominently visible difference 

 except in size. Curious resemblances in features of line or ex- 

 pression may be remarked between the portraits of the Felidce 

 in Wood's Natural History and cats with which the observer is 

 acquainted. A copy of the photograph of the head and breast of 

 a tiger at rest, in a portfolio by our side, might be easily mis- 

 taken, except for a few differences in the shading of the hair, for 

 a life-size portrait of the cat that has given the occasion of this 

 article. St. George Mivart recognizes fifty living species of the 

 cat family, forty-eight of which he includes in the genus Felis. 



The history of the domestic cat has been traced back to the 

 ancient Egyptians, among whom the earliest notices of it appear 



