9 2 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Fig. 1.— Egyptian Cat (Felis maniculata.) 



on the monuments of the second empire of the twelfth dynasty 

 (about 2400 b. a), at Beni Hassan. It seems to have appeared 

 there just after the Egyptians had made considerable conquests 

 in Nubia, whence it may have been brought, already domesticated, 

 among the spoils of war. The mummified cats in the Egyptian 



tombs are not identical with 

 our house cat, but seem to 

 belong to a native species 

 (Felis maniculata, Pig. 1) 

 which is said to be still in- 

 digenous in Nubia, where it 

 is found on the western side 

 of the Nile, in a stony dis- 

 trict in which brushwood 

 grows. 



The domesticated animal 

 was slow in making its way 

 from Egypt into the neighboring nations. The Hebrews were ap- 

 parently without it, and it is not once mentioned in the Bible. No 

 evidence has been found that the Assyrians and Babylonians were 

 acquainted with it. According to authors who have investigated 

 the philological branch of the history, these people possessed a 

 binary nomenclature for animals, with generic and specific names, 

 and included their lions and panthers among the dogs — a thing 

 they would hardly have done if they had been familiar with house 

 cats. It was not known to the Greeks and Romans till a compar- 

 atively late period ; and all the earlier representations of cats on 

 their monuments are referred by the authorities to the wild cat 

 or some other animal than the domestic cat. According to the 

 most careful conclusions on this subject, the mouser of the Greeks 

 and Romans was a weasel, and led an independent, not a domestic, 

 life. The Aryans of India had cats at a very early but not at 

 their earliest period ; for while the names of the animal are all 

 Aryan, it was not, according to Pictet, designated by any simple 

 term such as would have been given it in primitive times, but by 

 composite names, having such meanings as "house-animal," " rat- 

 eater/' and " mouse-enemy." The name of the wild cat (Fig. 2), 

 however, embodied a root common to many of the European lan- 

 guages. It becomes in Persian, pushak ; in Afghan, pishik ; in 

 Kurdish, psiq; in Lithuanian, pnije ; in Irish, pus and feisag ; 

 and in Erse, pusag and piseag ; whence the English "puss." It is 

 derived by Pictet from a Sanskrit root puclilia or pitclilia, that 

 means ''tail/' and therefore points to one of the most striking 

 external features of the animal. The name by which the cat 

 was known to the later Greeks — alXovpos — and which was origi- 

 nally applied to the weasel, refers to the same feature. It is 



