i8> Mr. Broderip on the importance of Facts 



to the Honourable Daines Barrington, dated " Selborne, May 9, 

 1776 ; " and proceeds thus : 



*' My friend had a little helpless leveret brought to him, which the 

 servants fed with milk in a spoon, and about the same time his cat 

 kittened, and the young were dispatched and buried. The hare was 

 soon lost, and supposed to be gone the way of most fondlings, to be 

 killed by some dog or cat. However, in about a fortnight, as the 

 master was sitting in his garden in the dusk of the evening, he observed 

 his cat, with tail erect, trotting towards him, and calling with little 

 short inward notes of complaceny, such as they use towards their kit- 

 tens, and something gamboling after, which proved to be the leveret, 

 that the cat had supported with her milk, and continued to support 

 with great affection. 



" Thus was a graminivorous animal nurtured by a carnivorous and 

 predaceous one ! 



" Why so cruel and sanguinary a beast as a cat, of the ferocious 

 genus of Felis, the murium leo^ as Linnaeus calls it, should be affected 

 with any tenderness towards an animal which ^ is its natural prey, is not 

 so easy to determine, 



" This strange affection was probably occasioned by that clesiderium, 

 those tender maternal feelings, which the loss of her kittens had a- 

 wakened in her breast ; and by the complacency and ease she derived 

 to herself from the procuring her teats to be drawn, which were too 

 much distended with milk, till, from habit, she became as much de- 

 lighted with this foundling as if it had been her real offspring. 



" This incident is no bad solution of that strange circumstance which 

 grave historians as well as the poets assert, of exposed children being 

 sometimes nurtured by female wild beasts that probably had lost their 

 young. For it is not one whit more marvellous that Romulus and 

 Remus, in their infant state, should be nursed by a she wolf, than that 

 a poor little sucking leveret should be fostered and cherished by a 

 bloody grimalkin — 



-^ " viridi foetam Mavortis in antra 



Procubuisse lupam : geminos huic ubera circum 

 Ludere pendentes pueros, et lambere matrem 

 Impavidos : illam tereti cervice reflexam 

 Mulcere ctlternos, et corpora fingere lingui." 



Thus far Mr. White.— On the 27th of April, 1820, I saw a Cat 

 giving suck to five young Rats and a Kitten : the rats were about 



